Get photos from your phone onto your computer with a simple bump to the spacebar

Get photos from your phone onto your computer with a simple bump to the spacebar:

Bump has done it again. The simple app that lets you “bump” phones together to swap data and files is now letting you do the same thing with your phone and a computer.
Starting today, you can bump photos from your phone to your computer. Just navigate to the Bump URL, gently tap the phone to the computer’s spacebar, and the photos will magically appear on the computer.
“Photo sharing is really popular,” said Bump co-founder and CEO Dave Lieb in a phone call with VentureBeat. “We’ve had, like, 600 million photos shared by our users in the past two years alone.”
And when features are that popular, the Bup team’s goal becomes making the feature as simple as possible. “You don’t want to deal with email or putting them online; you just want to bump them over,” Lieb said.
Would-be Bumpers don’t have to install any new software on the computer. Once the initial “bump” happens, you’ll be able to save the photos to your computer’s hard drive with one click. Or you can get a shortlink to share the pics anywhere you want. Bump will host the images free for an indefinite period of time.
“It’s a really simple product, but from what we’ve heard from our users, it’s something they’re going to really love,” Lieb said.
“When I tell tech people about this feature, they say, ‘Why don’t I just use iCloud or Dropbox?’” he said. “But I’m a technologist, and I don’t even know how to figure iCloud out. People don’t take the time to set up even these automated things… This is a little bit more effort, but it’s just more cognitively simple.”
That kind of simplicity has become a core value for the startup. When Bump relaunched its mobile app back in February, it had pared the whole thing down to just the most two popular features. That bare-bones approach made it easy for the team to focus on making those two features better, prettier, and easier for people to use. The phone-to-desktop bump is an extension of that.
Lieb said that in the future, the Bump team might consider the phone-to-desktop bump for other types of files, such as videos or MP3s. “Certainly, it’s technically possible,” he said. “What we want to focus on is the really big pain points, and moving photos was the biggest one. People were sick of emailing photos to themselves or trying to find their syncing cable.”
And Bump has a lot more waiting in the wings. “A couple things we’re working on now are really cool,” said Lieb, “cooler than some of the things we’ve launched so far.” We can’t wait to find out (and tell you) more soon.
Image courtesy of DaBoost, Shutterstock

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat