In the battle to achieve simplicity, it’s a mouse click here or there that can make all the difference. In the field of image sharing on the Web, Imgur has held the top spot and its simplicity has certainly been one of the reasons.
A new service called Minus has entered the image sharing arena and it makes sharing image files – on their own, in online galleries, and zipped together as downloadable collections – as easy as a quick drag and drop.
The subtitle to the site, “share simply”, says it all. The site is as simple as it gets – stark white with a box in the center asking the user to drag pictures onto the page. From there, the box says, they’ll “do the rest.” There’s no need for account creation, no email confirmations and it’s all anonymous if you’d like.
Minus currently limits uploads to a 7 MB max per image, with support for JPEG, GIF, PNG, APNG and BMP file formats. With each image in a collection, you see the image itself, its dimensions, file size and a link to share it. In the upper right corner, there is a box to navigate the collection with an option to download it as a .zip file.
The one thing that almost seems too fancy for the site is the elegance of the image navigation, with only one image showing up in focus at a time. Click on an out of focus image and it smoothly moves into the center and becomes clear as the others move away and blur.
In the end, it’s this elegant, simple design and lack of social media clutter, however, that makes Minus feel like what it claims to be – simple.
Watch out, Imgur, there’s an even simpler kid on the block.
