Dropbox announced it’s giving away up to 5GB of free storage to those willing to participate in a bit of an experiment. A Dropbox team member posted in the Dropbox forum about a new build of the software with improvements for automatic uploading of photos and videos as a priority. As a reward for helping the team test out this beta release, for each 500MB of photos or videos a user imports, that user will receive an additional 500MB of storage credited to their account. The free storage maxes out at 5GB.
Is Dropbox feeling the pressure from Apple’s iCloud syncing service? Apple provides each user with 5GB of free storage and that’s all for just documents, backups, and data. iTunes content and your Photo Stream library don’t count toward the free 5GB in iCloud. Especially with Photo Stream, which syncs your photos across all iOS devices and your Mac or PC, users don’t need alternatives anymore. I’m sure Dropbox had this in mind when it decided to give beta testers free storage for syncing photos.
I’m a Dropbox user and I recommend the service wholeheartedly, but I must say since iCloud became available, I’ve stopped using it significantly. It’s no longer necessary for photos at all. The only thing I use it for is syncing documents across devices. iCloud does that too, but not well since iWork ’09 doesn’t support syncing. If a newer version of iWork comes out and presumably supports iCloud, Dropbox could be in an even deeper hole.
Are you a loyal Dropbox user or is iCloud adequate for your needs? Be sure to weigh in below in the comments.