Last week we launched a new web application called Minimise It, you can check out a video demo at Screenr. The reason why Minimise It came into being was because whilst content management systems provide resizing functionality, they don’t usually support cropping. This can lead to awkwardly sized photos to prevent cutting people’s heads off, and a lack of focus on the subject at small sizes. Minimise It solves this problem by letting you upload your photos, crop and resize then download the resulting image, all using a simple, user-friendly interface.

We’re looking into developing an official API so we can integrate the service into our other various services, 3rd parties will also be able to do so, but the stand-alone site will be kept online – we want it to always be available to anyone with a website regardless of who made it or the platform it runs on.

The power of open-source

It took us less than 2 days to build and deploy Minimise It, and this wouldn’t have been possible without a few open-source projects. The server runs Ubuntu Linux Server as it’s operating system, the web server is Nginx, the database engine is SQLite3, the image processing engine is ImageMagick, the framework is Ruby on Rails, the Rails plugin for ImageMagick is Paperclip and the wonderful plugin for the cropping is Jcrop – all of these are open source! Of course, there is a lot of ‘glue’ between these that we had to work on to build the finished application, but it would have taken much, much longer to develop without them.

Browser support

Minimise It now supports the most popular modern browsers: Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8. If you find any issues, please let us know.