Creating WinZip files - Help Please
Creating WinZip files - Help Please
Author
Discussion

iluvmercs

Original Poster:

7,541 posts

258 months

Sunday 3rd December 2006
quotequote all
Whenever I try to create WinZip files which contain photos, they do not get compressed very much at all.

I just zipped a folder containing 40.5MB of JPEG photos. The file was only compressed to 40.4MB!

How can I make this smaller (to around 7MB) without splitting the folder into several emails?

Many thanks,

Darren

roadsweeper

3,789 posts

305 months

Sunday 3rd December 2006
quotequote all
The compression you can achieve with any utility, including WinZip, depends on the type of file being compressed. For example, if you tried to zip a zip file then you wouldn't expect to see any compression at all. In this case, you are compressing JPEG images - JPEG itself is a compressed format, which is why you're not seeing a reduction in size.

You can either reduce the size (i.e. pixel height and width) of the photos and/or reduce the JPEG compression quality to reduce their size. A free utility like the GIMP will do this for you.

Hope this helps.

ThePassenger

6,962 posts

266 months

Sunday 3rd December 2006
quotequote all
Just to add, that when increasing the compression of a JPG you begin to reduce the quality of it. So it's something to tinker with (often on a picture by picture basis) to get acceptable results.

iluvmercs

Original Poster:

7,541 posts

258 months

Sunday 3rd December 2006
quotequote all
D'oh! I didn't realise JPEGs were compressed files.

Thanks so far, but another quick question....

AOL only seem to allow 7 or 8Mb attachments onto their emails. So would I just need to send several emails, or is their any cheat that I can use to send them in one?

Darren