A few days ago I shared about a simple tool to send large files to friends via the web app Large Documents. Today I’m sharing yet another file sharing web app.

What? File sharing again? Yes, but this is different. The one I’m going to introduce, Minus, is a tool that has another focus – gallery creation. While you upload files just like most other web apps, Minus gives you are interactive gallery view that is very suitable for multimedia files.

Let me show you how.

Minus has a user registration system, but as a guest you can use almost every function of it, so just “Select” in the main screen. A dialog will appear to let you choose files to upload. A simpler way is drag your files directly to the page. After that, hit “Done”. I used the album covers of my Jazz collection to demonstrate.

What make Minus different from other file sharing web apps will then appear. Instead of giving me the download link, Minus takes me to a gallery for browsing through the image files I uploaded. I can press left and right on my keyboard or use my mouse to choose them one by one.

Things do not stop here. To make it even more useful as a gallery, Minus allows me to add captions to every image, re-arrange order of files and individually view each file. When every work’s done, simply copy the link and paste to wherever you want or use the icons provided to share to social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Stumble Upon and Digg or via email.

Apart from image files, Minus also claims that they support PDF, MP3 and a whole list of pure text file formats including HTML (they said M$ documents and video files are in the pipeline). I haven’t got the time to try them all, but Minus has provided a sample gallery that you can try. It’s quite interesting that even MP3 is available in gallery mode with built-in player.

A good new is that currently Minus is free. An even better news is the files you placed on Minus will be kept forever unless you the uploader delete them. However you are not encouraged to you Minus as online file storage space since every file is subject to a 25MB limit. Sorry, you cannot share the DVD you ripped with your friends (look for somewhere else, please).

Most browsers are officially supported but Minus recommends using the latest version Firefox, Google Chrome or Safari for Mac for the best experience. Besides, the following routes to Minus are available:

• Desktop client on Mac, Windows and Linux
• Mobile apps for Android, iPhone/iPad and Windows Phone 7
• Chrome browser extension and web app

I like the name of this web app. Nowadays web apps tend to be made with lots of functions and complicated user interface. Can we enjoy both brilliant functions AND simple control? By eliminating unnecessary user actions, Minus gave us a good demonstration.

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This is an article in my blog. See the original post here.