Helping people with computers... one answer at a time.
Most picture and movie files are already compressed, which means that they won't save space if made into a ZIP file.
Can I ZIP my pictures or MP3 files to save space?
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ZIP is a very popular compression algorithm supported by many popular programs such as WinZip and PKZip, and recent versions of Microsoft Windows. ZIPping can often reduce the size of many files significantly.
Note, though that I said "often". That doesn't mean "always".
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Pictures in popular formats such as .jpg or .gif are already compressed. As are .mp3 audio files. As are all popular movie formats. Depending on the type of compression being used, compressing an already-compressed file at best does very little, and at worst makes the file bigger.
So there's typically no advantage to ZIPping a photo, a movie, or an MP3.
The one time it can be handy to ZIP compressed files is if you want to take several files (for example several pictures) and combine them into a single file for a single download. People still need to unZIP before they can see them, but it can be simpler to download one file rather than several.
Article C2229 - November 21, 2004
Leo A. Notenboom has been playing with computers since he
was required to take a programming class in 1976. An 18 year career as a programmer at Microsoft soon followed.
After "retiring" in 2001, Leo started Ask Leo! in 2003 as a place for answers
to common computer and technical questions. More about Leo.
Too bad about the .zip method, have 1000's of mp3s on my hd. taking up too much room.
Thanks Marc for the IExpress 411. First I've seen that, although I've seen tools designed to make .exe's from other formats. And there it is right in windows! I'll have to try it out sometime (with junk files to start)!
John N.
Posted by: John N. at May 15, 2009 4:17 PMI wish to send about 30 songs to a friend and I used iexpress and put a whole lot of music in and it worked but when I closed it I cannot see the file and when I open it again and put the name of the file in it says it does not exist and to create a new file - it must be somewhere where do I look? can you help please I am using Vista
Posted by: bianka at October 13, 2009 11:44 AMi just read all these comments and.. i feel sorry for you XD i cant beleive these people even know how to fill out this forum im typing in...
Posted by: Kriss at March 18, 2010 1:04 AMZipping files that are already in a compressed format (jpg, for example) may save space, but not due to compression savings. Files are allocated in "chunks". Any space that is left over in the file's last chunk is effectively wasted space. The more files, the more wasted space. If you combine all of these files into one archive (zip or otherwise) then you have only the wasted space at the end of the one archive file instead of the waste in each of the component files. However, you have to weigh the space saving against the inconvenience of accessing the files through the archived format. Also, there is a certain amount of space taken up by the zip file header.
Posted by: Jim de Graff at April 9, 2010 9:00 PMIt SHOULD be possible to compress an mp3 file to a much smaller size (in a lossless format). Yes an mp3 file is "compressed" but for a standard constant bitrate file each second of sound is allocated a fixed number of bytes.
Most music files will contain repetition, eg a riff or chorus that appears multiple times in the file, and therefore it should be possible, given the right algorithm, to compress out this duplication.
Why this doesn't happen in reality I guess is that the standard compression algorithms either do not detect this duplication for whatever reason or simply do not deal with it.
Maybe someday someone will come up with a totally lossless file compression algorithm for mp3s and even wav, although by then we may all have switched to lossless compression in the first place.
Posted by: Earl Purple at May 24, 2010 3:29 PM