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Image hosting that doesn't suck - just drag and drop
- chrisbroadfoot 16y agoI'm surprised it took this long for someone to create such a simple image hosting service.
- nickbarnwell 16y agoimgur is pretty close, and has a huge community (reddit) behind it.
- mindotus 16y agoThanks for the positive feedback :D John here from Minus!
- nickbarnwell 16y agoI can definitely see this being more convenient, and the way you've implemented it is certainly slick. I'd be more interested if it was offered as a service for image hosting/uploading that other sites could use rather than forcing everyone to roll their own Java/Flash/JS+HTML/HTML variants for every new site they do.
- mindotus 16y agoThanks for the feedback and yes I agree that is something we're considering especially allowing others to embed similar drag-n-drop tools on their site to share onto Minus. We already have an API documented and ready but just not yet released. If anyone is interested in testing it, feel free to shoot an email over to john@min.us and i'll send it right over! Some tech specs on Minus: http://blog.min.us/2010/10/14/minus-tech-spec/ http://blog.min.us/2010/10/14/minus-tech-spec/ (PS: We were inspired by Glen Murphy's Dropmocks design and really hope to make Minus into a universal sharing tool with wider compatibility and support for documents, music, video and more in the near future. In the works = desktop app and firefox/chrome extensions ^^) Cheers John
- kellishaver 16y agoJohn, This is great. I love the simplicity of it. That said, while drag and drop is super easy, I think you should still offer a more traditional upload method in addition to it. Often times, I have several windows open, none of which is a folder full of images and no desire to re-purpose one or open more. Drag and drop is great if you want to share a bunch of images, but if you're just uploading a screen shot for someone to quickly review or what have you, having to stop what you're doing, open yet another window, browse to the folder, drag browser windows around so that you can then select the photo and drag it into the browser is significantly slower than just clicking a browse button, selecting the image, and clicking upload. Drag and drop is pretty idiot-proof, and for bulk uploads, it's faster, but for single images and multi-tasking users, it can actually be a lot slower. Having both options would be ideal.
- mindotus 16y agoTraditional upload by 'browse' is enabled for Internet Explorer + Opera at the moment. We'll make it available for all browsers this week, it's definitely good point ! Thanks again :)
- gmurphy 16y ago:( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1703197 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1703197
- chrisbroadfoot 16y agoTotally missed this. A couple things: A) The name isn't as good. B) You don't get a direct link to the image, just a link to the gallery. C) It seems a little slow. Otherwise, nice!
- kacy 16y agoWow. It may just be the simplicity of the two sites, but they share a lot of similar characteristics and design choices. Do you know if that was done on purpose? Update: Found this on their about page. "The first prototype for Minus was inspired by Glen Murphy's design and was launched on October 13th, 2010."
- yatsyk 16y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong but it's impossible to cover S3 costs with ads displayed near pictures. According to FAQ you are going to leave picture unlimited time (and paying for space in S3) even if no one is visiting page with picture.
- mindotus 16y agoThanks for bringing that up. We are exploring many monetization strategies and business models but we will definitely keep that in mind. We may implement few different models but in the end our mission is to keep Minus free, simple and minimal in making sharing easy and fast :)
- prime0196 16y agoNot true. Twitpic makes well over a few million in ad revenue. http://mixergynotes.com/2010/02/14/noah-everett-twitpic/ http://mixergynotes.com/2010/02/14/noah-everett-twitpic/
- jrnkntl 16y agoWorks as advertised! Minimal and clean. I just tried to copy the url of my 3.1mb image into my browser but it hanged; turns out you use a base64 encoded string of the whole image to display it like: data:image/png;base64,... etc Was this technically necessary? I guess so, but since you show the direct link underneath it, why not replace it with that one?
- mindotus 16y agoThanks for the feedback/comment :) We display the image that way so you are able to Preview it while the image uploads to our server in the backend. Once it finishes however you refresh and will see the images loaded from our server. We also convert larger images into shrunken sizes for the gallery so it can be viewed without too much lag, but the full size image will still be available via the "Link to Image" or "Download all as Zip" function :) John
- random42 16y agoNeat service! Would like to have a copy to clipboard button (A low hanging fruit, I suppose), for the image url.
- mindotus 16y agoThat is coming this week :D John
- scrrr 16y agoCurious: Can this be done in pure html/js or is Flash still the way to go to make this work cross-browser/cross-platform? John: Great implementation. Wishing you much success. I'll be using it for my public images.
- mindotus 16y agoThanks, appreciate it :) As for the copy to clipboard implementation, we're still exploring the best way to do it for max compatibility. If anyone has suggestions feel free to buzz me at john@min.us
- chrisbroadfoot 16y agoYou really do need to use Flash, AFAIK. I investigated this a while ago. Firefox has an API, but the user has to change an option to specifically allow access to the clipboard. In the end, I figured it wasn't worth it, and that programmatically selecting the textbox was 90% of the functionality without all the headache.
- mindotus 16y agoThanks for the advice, we will definitely look into it!
- random42 16y agoHaving explored it myself, I will say go with flash (Yeah, I am sorry :( ), else you'll run into browserism
- pippy 16y agoWorks great http://min.us/ip99S.gif http://min.us/ip99S.gif
- mindotus 16y agoGlad to see it in action :)
- jwtanner 16y agoExcellent design. Big question: how will they make money?
- mindotus 16y agoWe have few business models in mind and monetization strategies. We will explore them as time goes on very carefully, but right now our goal is to make Minus better and increase compatibility for mobile platforms and more such as allowing documents and other filetypes. John
- nickbarnwell 16y agoThis is spurred more by your username than anything else, but how is it pronounced? Minus, or "Min dot us"?
- scrrr 16y agoHeadline could be: The Imgur-Killer
- mindotus 16y ago:) Look out for document support soon on Minus including PDF, TXT, DOC, PPT and more!
- redthrowaway 16y agoWill your documents be crawlable??
- mindotus 16y agoWe have not yet decided on that at this point. Definitely something to consider.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- redthrowaway 16y agoI'd really like to be able to drag and drop images from other tabs, as saving to disk is a pain in the ass. I suspect, however, that that's a Chrome issue, not a minus issue. Still, great site!
- antimatter15 16y agoIt's actually possible to drag and drop images from other tabs, but there's some weird almost unavoidable issues. Google Docs's presentation app allows you to drag and drop images.
- thingie 16y agoIs there any other way to drop a picture? Even though drag & drop seems to be the easiest and most comfortable way, for me, it is not :-) I'd have to run some kind of file manager, find the directory, image, carefully position both file manager window and the browser, do the job and then put everything back. Surprisingly hard, but that's a real setup that I have (and many people I know too).
- cing 16y agoAre you saying that you'd like to do image hosting from command line? I think you might be opposite to the target audience of this site.
- chrisbroadfoot 16y agoThat would be cool, though. Personally, I either want to upload stuff from Finder, or upload stuff from the command line. What I hate doing is browsing to an image from a file picker. Something like http://sprunge.us/ http://sprunge.us/ for images would be great!
- abraham 16y agoYou could use googlecl: http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/ http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/
- brlewis 16y agoYou can use the built-in photo sharing on Dropbox, or use Dropbox integration with http://ourdoings.com/ http://ourdoings.com/
- xiongchiamiov 16y agoImgur has a nice API. I modified a ruby CLI for uploading images to imgur to fit my particular needs; you can find it at https://github.com/xiongchiamiov/limgur https://github.com/xiongchiamiov/limgur (or gem install limgur). I believe you can also upload things pretty simply using curl, but I wanted to be able to generate bbCode thumbnails and such in one fell swoop.
- quizbiz 16y agoAs a photographer, I love that you guys are allowing for the high res uploads. I'm also a fan of the minimalist feel. The animations are very cool but they need to be smoother. :)
- mindotus 16y agoThanks :) We're definitely working on optimizing things for the user end and keeping it minimal/simple is our top priority. If anyone can contribute in terms of optimizing the frontend loading/speed for "larger images" feel free to drop me at john@min.us
- evgeny0 16y agoLove it! Clean, so simple it requires almost no instructions and it JUST WORKS. I also love the fact that I don't have to wait for the current image (or batch) to finish uploading and can immediately drag more files in. (Actually, that last feature made me feel stupid for a moment: I wondered how images seemed to be uploaded so "instantly" and only after testing it on a large image file did I realise that you're just displaying the local image!)
- carlhu 16y agoThis is Carl (Minus cofounder). Exactly, Evgeny: When you drop an image into Minus, we immediately show the local image to offer the user immediate usability. The image is uploaded in the background. We'll add indicators to make this more obvious. Thanks for the feedback!
- samratjp 16y agoAnd I thought Dropbox photos folder was the lazy man's photo hosting thus far... +1 for the minus team!
- pilif 16y agoThe cynical side of me makes me think that this will go down the road of all other image hosting services that didn't suck: To cover the immense bandwidth costs, sooner or later, it will have to suck like everybody else. At that point, a new service that "doesn't suck" will pop up.
- Retric 16y agoThere are several hosting services that offer 3+TB per month plans for 130$ / month. So if you stick with 1MB images you only need to recover ~1 cent per 200 downloads to break even. IMO, that seems doable.
- sebastianavina 16y agoactually, Imgur.com was announced with exactly the same title at reddit some time ago... edit: found it http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting/ http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to...
- pilif 16y agothat's what I had in mind, but I didn't know whether imgur was known here.
- BTBurke 16y agoWorks great, but when I tested it out as an anonymous user, then decided to sign up, it didn't import the gallery I just made.
- carlhu 16y agoOur thinking was that the galleries people create anonymously are different than the galleries people want to associate their user with, so we make sure to make those two histories completely separate. Any ideas on how we can make this more clear from a UX design perspective?
- simzen85 16y agoPhotos are best viewed on dark background (e.g Flickriver), can you provide some templates and a quick way to switch between them ? Also, could we have slideshow for playback where nothing will be displayed except the photos themselves ?
- mindotus 16y agoThanks, both features we have on our to-do list already, be sure to vote them up in http://feedback.min.us http://feedback.min.us , we're doing our best to prioritize them.
- synnik 16y agoThere are other services with drag/drop to upload your photos. The one I use even works dragging directly from Picasa, so I don't even have to touch my own file system. From what I can tell, min.us has no other features, so I'm very confused as to why this "doesn't suck". It seems to be a non-unique UI interface to plain old photo sharing.
- chrisbroadfoot 16y agoIf you're confused as to why this "doesn't suck", then please tell me why it sucks! Please note that I didn't make the claim that it's amazing or ground-breaking. :)
- emzo 16y agoThis is really nice and clean. Personally, I think it's a bad name though. Minus? I appreciate it does "emphasize simplicity and minimalism", but it's got nothing at all to do with images. Also, it would be even better if you could include some form of federated login so I don't have to sign up.
- carlhu 16y agoThis is Carl, cofounder of Minus. Thank you for the suggestions. We are looking into adding OpenID and Google Login soon. In the mean time, we designed Minus in the hope that you can use Minus effectively without having to sign up at all!
- jonpaul 16y agoThis looks similar to http://dropmocks.com http://dropmocks.com same people with new domain?
- chrisbroadfoot 16y agoSee below. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1929010 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1929010 (and replies)
- ctdonath 16y agoiOS! iOS! iOS! ...please!
- imran 16y agoAwesome!