More aggressive zipping?

corblimey

Today, I thought I'd zip up my photos from previous holidays in order to save some space. However, using 7zip, the results are less than satisfactory. 2.95gigs of photos zips up to 2.93gigs, not much of a saving, and not worth the effort. I assume this is because the photos are already highly compressed (.jpg format) but is there a more aggressive (and free) zipping tool I could use that might save a lot more space?

Rabbo

Would you consider resizing the photos? Photos taken with newer digital cameras have often way higher resolutions than you would really need.

You could use something like this: http://photobatch.stani.be/download/index.html

I resized thousands of my archive photos recently and freed up something like 50GB of space

corblimey

Tks Rabbo, I did resize them specifically for uploading to my blog, but kept the originals just in case I needed better resolutions later. Of course 5 years later, I've not needed the originals again, so maybe I should resize them.

moc moc a moc

Store them online somewhere and be done with them. Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, etc etc.

Francis O Blibhionn

There are hard limits to the degree that you can compress information, and as you note, compressed information itself usually responds poorly to more compression.
Even if you found software with a much more developed algorithm, and put as much processing time into it as you could, you could end up with the same or worse results.

So basically, you're boned

superelliptic

moc moc a moc wrote: »

Store them online somewhere and be done with them. Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, etc etc.

In the short term this is a good solution - Google Drive gives you about 15GB of storage. Think you get about 10 or 12GB with Microsoft Onedrive (formerly SkyDrive). Not sure about the others...

Heres some info on cloud storage pricing for Drive and OneDrive;

Google Drive; 15GB for free - € for more
https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2375123?hl=en

MS OneDrive; 15GB for free - € for more
https://onedrive.live.com/about/en-us/plans/


I don't work for either of these guys btw...:pac:

28064212

If it's only photos, Flickr might be a better option. 1000 gigabytes of storage for free

the_syco

corblimey wrote: »

I assume this is because the photos are already highly compressed (.jpg format)

Resizing jpg files will just get you bad quality images. Best off buying an external harddrive that you don't plan on using for anything else, and put your photos on that. Backup the photos on external media anyway, in case your current harddrive fails.