The time of film cameras expires irrevocably. Today, digital technologies used in modern cameras or mobile gadgets allow you to shoot with incredible quality and resolution. And this leads to an increase in image size. So you have to figure out how to archive photos in order to reduce the disk space.
Why you need to archive photos
As already clear, high-quality images are quite "heavy". Many film enthusiasts do not even think that setting the maximum size and resolution on the camera or mobile device, when copying photos to the hard drive of a computer or laptop, they will run into the problem of free space.
Well, of course, if there is a hard drive or a removable USB device for a few terabytes. But what to do when the space is clearly limited, and you do not want to store the photo on the camera’s memory card, because you have to shoot in the future? Here we will help a few basic ways that provide an answer to the question of how to archive photos. Or, in extreme cases, how to reduce their "weight".
Basic principles of size reduction
With regard to reducing the physical size of a photo or its volume in terms of occupied disk space, there are several basic ways that many users simply do not know about. In addition to the fact that any standard program for archiving files and folders can perform such an operation, you can resort to using the simplest utilities included in the standard set of Windows OS. Or give preference to third-party utilities or online services that can cope with such tasks. But first things first.
Using the standard Paint program
Not all Windows users are aware that reducing the size and volume of photographs can be done using a simple drawing utility called Paint. Of course, the archive in the usual sense of the file will not work, but here the size can really be reduced.
Why are we talking about Paint? Yes, simply because sometimes when reducing the size in this application, then no data archiving program will be needed. In this case, everything is simple. You need to open the necessary file and use the resize function, indicating from the original 50% vertically and horizontally.
It goes without saying that in the parameters you need to set the preservation of proportions. Note that this will not especially affect the quality, because editable images often have dimensions of more than three thousand pixels vertically or horizontally. In other words, the photo is so large that even in some social networks this size cannot be uploaded. For normal image quality, it’s enough to have dimensions of the order of 1000x600 pixels, and when saving, use the .jpg format, not .png or .bmp. Such a photo can be printed without any problems. However, "shoveling" hundreds of photographs is extremely inconvenient and difficult in time.
FastStone Image Viewer App
Much easier to use the specialized utility FastStone Image Viewer. In addition to editing photos, she knows a lot more.
So, for example, for quick editing of the whole folder that contains the home archive of photos, you need to select it in the application window, select all the files, and then use the “Send by e-mail” option, then set the necessary compression options in a new window . It is better to set the photo size at the level of 800x600 pixels, then uncheck the options like “Save EXIF / IRTC data”, “Add frame”, etc. Setting up archiving also means renaming all processed files (this is already optional). Ultimately, after a short wait, the program will resize the photos and pack them in a single archive, which can be sent to friends without problems.
Standard archivers
One of the most common solutions to the problem of how to archive a folder with photos is to use standard archivers, among which WinRAR, WinZIP, 7-Zip, etc. are worth mentioning separately.
This method assumes standard file and folder compression without actually resizing snapshots. Naturally, depending on the quality and initial size, the compression can reach 20-95%. Nevertheless, such applications also have their advantages.
First of all, in searching for the answer to the question of how to archive photos, it should be taken into account that in the preliminary settings you can set, say, the creation of a self-extracting archive, which, when opened, works like a regular "executable" file, requesting only the place to extract the contents.
On the other hand, you can adjust the size of the future archive for some media such as CD / DVD-ROMs, add files to already created archives, create multi-volume archives, etc. As they say, this method is the easiest. True, when unpacking, the extracted files will occupy the same amount of space on the hard drive or removable media as before.
Using online services
In some cases, you can use specialized Internet resources that offer photo compression functions without loss of quality. Today you can find a lot of them. The essence of the work of such sites is that first the user downloads the necessary data (individual files or entire folders), then waits for the processing to complete, and then downloads the result to his computer terminal. In principle, everything is simple, but the time for such operations can greatly increase. This may be due to the speed of Internet access or some unforeseen deviations in the operation of the sites themselves. However, in the problem of how to archive the folder with photos, this approach can be called the easiest for lazy people. And a high-quality result is not always guaranteed.
Cloud storage
Very many Internet users prefer to use the so-called "cloud" storage - services that offer to use disk space on remote servers. True, there may be problems. The fact is that not all such storages have the functions of archiving data on the fly. Even with this possibility, the time for uploading photos to a resource (upload) takes a lot of time. Even gigabyte material will be loaded for a long time.
On the other hand, this can prevent photos from being deleted or damaged due to damage to the hard drive of your own computer or removable device in the form of a flash drive, not to mention optical disks.
Total
If to summarize a peculiar result, in solving the problem of how to archive photos, we can highlight several of the most acceptable options. As already understood, the simplest way is to use conventional archivers. The archive will "weigh" much less than the original folder, but when you extract it, the problem of free space may appear again.
If there are not many pictures, you can edit them in the Paint application, but the FastStone Image Viewer program (or any similar one) looks the most attractive. Here, after all, not only the resizing of photographs is performed, but also packaging in the archive. Thus, this package is the most functional. By the way, despite the seeming complexity of this software product, even an entry-level user will not be able to deal with it, not to mention professionals, for whom the application provides a fairly wide field of activity in terms of additional compression and archiving settings for individual files, and entire photo albums with an impressive amount of data.