This week saw a couple of new photography-based apps that can expand your smartphone camera's abilities, and can make saving, backing up, and sharing photos easy. Also, we discover an older Android app that's infinitely useful if you own a Mac computer.

Carousel, By Dropbox

Dropbox is quickly transforming from an online storage service to a multi-app cloud platform, and nothing makes that more evident than the fact that Dropbox acquired Loom, a popular cloud storage app for photos, this week. Loom users will be offered the same amount of storage on Dropbox, and one would assume some of its features will end up being built-in to the next version of Carousel -- Dropbox's new cloud photo app for iOS and Android that was released just a few days ago -- making it even better than it already is.

But the current iteration of Carousel is pretty elegant already. Carousel, much like Apple's iCloud or Google+ photo saving, automatically backs up your photos into your Dropbox cloud account.

The free app is likely aimed at convincing Dropbox users at the free level that they could use a little more (paid) storage, and since Carousel is so breezy and graceful to use, that strategy makes a lot of sense.

Carousel provides an infinite-scroll view of your photo gallery, organized by time and place. But instead of, for example, Apple's zoomed-out and cluttered-looking year-by-year view, Carousel has a handy scroll wheel at the bottom that lets you easily flow through decades of photos that are still a normal (not tiny) thumbnail size.

Sharing is easy too, and while Dropbox is emphasizing in-network user sharing with private messages, you can send photos to anyone pretty quickly. All the photos are cached locally while browsing, so there's no waiting for things to load from the cloud as you browse, and the backup copies in the cloud are full resolution. You can request a copy of your entire photo/video library in a zip file for local storage as well.

It'll be interesting to see what new features and integrations the Loom acquisition will bring, but right now Carousel by Dropbox is a great, polished alternative to iCloud and other cloud photo services. Get it here for Android and iOS.

Google Camera

Google Camera is basically an updated version of the Nexus Android camera for any Android device that runs KitKat (4.4) or newer. It greatly expands the abilities of your camera, through some software tricks, and -- like most "pure Android" Google software -- will likely feel less cluttered, simpler, and more fluid than your manufacturer's camera app.

The coolest thing about Google Camera (besides the fact that it has a large camera button that doesn't require so much searching and precise thumb placement!) is the Lens Blur feature.

Traditionally, smartphone cameras have taken decent pictures for everyday use, but the finished products were always easily identifiable as taken by a (cheap) digital camera -- everything in the photo is in relative focus, and nothing "pops," no matter what Instagram filter you put on it.

That's because most smartphone camera lenses are necessarily small and simple, compared to single lens reflex cameras (SLRs) or their digital counterparts (DSLRs), which are the cameras with big lenses and big and highly adjustable apertures -- you know, they look like "real" cameras.

Google's Camera app has figured out how to make photos that look more like they're made by a DSLR with a software trick that will work on any Android smartphone camera. It lets you, for example, take a picture with a shallow depth of field.

But what's even cooler, is that the software lets you pick your depth of field after you've taken the photo -- imitating with its free software the high-tech, expensive, and still relatively new specialist camera hardware called "light field cameras." Google goes in depth on how its new camera software works in this blog post, so if you're wondering how they did it, check it out.

Retune for Android

Finally, here's an older app that does one thing but does it well. For anyone who has an Android smartphone but a Mac computer, you've probably become very familiar with the connectivity issues (especially if you have a Samsung) built in by both sides of the Apple/Android divide.

They just usually don't play nice together.

It's usually a miserable task getting your Mac and Android to work together on any function, but not for controlling your computer's iTunes from your Android smartphone, thanks to Retune, the iTunes remote app.

Retune is free and refreshingly simple to set up. Just make sure iTunes on your Mac is in sharing mode on your WiFi (I keep an old one connected to the home theater system), pair your Android and Mac together, and voila! You've got a fully functional, easy to use mobile interface for your iTunes -- right on your Android tablet or smartphone.

Check it out for Android here.