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Err... Apparently, I suck at .zipping folders...

post #1 of 4
5/15/06 at 3:25pm
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I have a folder. Let's call it Folder A.

Folder A has about 252mb worth of photos. I want to email it with ease, so I choose to "archive" it.

It zips the file easily (a nice departure from my recently renounced PC-using practices), and then I check the file size.

248mb. The hell? I'm doing something wrong... where's my misstep?
20" iMac Core Duo
15" MacBook Pro
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20" iMac Core Duo
15" MacBook Pro
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post #2 of 4
5/15/06 at 5:28pm
Quote:
Originally posted by Animal Farm
I have a folder. Let's call it Folder A.

Folder A has about 252mb worth of photos. I want to email it with ease, so I choose to "archive" it.

It zips the file easily (a nice departure from my recently renounced PC-using practices), and then I check the file size.

248mb. The hell? I'm doing something wrong... where's my misstep?

You cannot expect a high degree of compression with jpg files. It's a side effect of them being very highly compressed to begin with. You may have slightly better compression if you use the zip command in terminal with the -9 option, but it's not likely to be that much better.

-t
I really do hope the next big thing isn't just a piece of UI garnish
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I really do hope the next big thing isn't just a piece of UI garnish
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post #3 of 4
5/15/06 at 6:03pm
Yeah I just tried an uncompressed Camera RAW file, it only compressed by a few kb. Compression or not, there isn't a whole lot of "white" space to work with in a pic file. Word on the other hand....a 64 kb Word.doc went to 20 kb when making a zip out of it using OS X. I'm no math expert but that's 1/3 of it's original size. Not too shabby.
There is a LOT of "white" space in Word docs....load them up with images however and the compression ratio gets cut.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever." - David St. Hubbins
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"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever." - David St. Hubbins
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post #4 of 4
5/16/06 at 2:18am
bzip is better than zip but you still won't save much space at all. If you could and it was fast enough, they would build that compression into the image compression algorithm.

If you don't want to split the sets manually, you can split a rar archive and e-mail the chunks. That's what I do for sending big files. Just remember to clean out your sent mail box every now and then.
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