Dropbox should acquire this 500 Startups photo-editing company

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — I sure hope file-sharing company Dropbox sent someone down to 500 Startups’ demo day today, because they should really talk to a nifty little startup called Lumific.

Lumific, presented by its co-founder and chief scientist Desmond Chik, is a tool that “magically” handles everything you’d want to do to your photos after going on a photography spree, including the sorting, enhancing, cropping, straightening, and even selecting the best looking ones. It’s the regular-folks version of fancy photo-editing software like Adobe’s Lightroom.

And Dropbox should really buy it.

Aside from the fact that Dropbox (and rival Box) has been on a acquisition frenzy, Lumific would actually make for a perfect addition to the way Dropbox’s users interact with the photos they store in their Dropbox accounts, which the company has been increasingly refining.

It’s no secret that much of Dropbox’s users are regular folks using it for personal files and media like photos and videos they shoot, and the company showed its commitment to being a great consumer product when it released Carousel last April, a mobile app made for your stored photos. In fact, Dropbox is so committed to that part of its business that it acquired Loom, a startup who’s app bears an uncanny resemblance to Carousel shortly before announcing it. It also carted in 3D photo startup Bubbli, although no word on what it’s doing with that yet.

A Lumific acquisition would be a great next stage in that evolution.

First we just stored photos on Dropbox, then we got a nice mobile app to interact with them, and next we should have the sorting and polishing done for us. And despite only having been around a little bit of time, Lumific’s team is already opening up a private beta for its first app, on Android, further showing that its technology really belongs on mobile.

When I asked Chik if an acquisition was on his mind, he said that it’s not really something he’s seeing happening anytime soon (who does!), but that a deeper integration with Dropbox and other photo-storage services would absolutely be great. He pretty surprised that none of those companies has already built and integrated such functionalities, so my suggestion that he marry his tool to photo storage is definitely not that crazy.

Chik and Jonathan Wills founded Lumific, and along with their third team member, Adrian Paul, the team has worked on visual effects for “Harry Potter,” “The Lego Movie,” and “The Matrix.” Check out their presentation deck here.