How to archive photos? Configuring Backup

The time of film cameras goes away irrevocably. Today, digital technology, used in modern cameras or mobile gadgets, allows you to shoot with incredible quality and resolution. And this leads to an increase in the size of the image. So we have to figure out how to archive photos to reduce the space on the disk.

Why you need to archive photos

As it is already clear, high-quality images are quite "heavy". Many fans take pictures do not even think that putting the maximum size and resolution on the camera or mobile device, when copying photos to the hard drive of a computer or laptop will face the problem of free space.

Well, of course, if you have a hard drive or a removable USB-device for several terabytes. But what to do when the place is clearly limited, and you do not want to store the photo on the camera's memory card, because you'll have to shoot in the future? Here we will help a few basic ways that give an answer to the question of how to archive photos. Or, in extreme cases, how to reduce their "weight".

Basic principles of reducing the size

As for reducing the physical size of a photo or its volume in terms of disk space, there are several main ways that many users simply do not guess. In addition, that any standard program for archiving files and folders can perform such an operation, you can resort to the help of the simplest utilities included in the standard Windows operating system. 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 know that reducing the size and volume of photos can be done with the help of a simple drawing utility called Paint. Of course, the archive in the usual sense of the file does not work, but here's the size really can be reduced.

Why are we talking about Paint? Yes, simply because sometimes when the size is reduced in this application, then no data archiving program is needed . In this case, everything is simple. You need to open the required file and use the resize function, pointing from the original 50% vertical and horizontal.

It goes without saying that in the parameters you need to set the preservation of proportions. Note, especially on quality this will not affect, because editable images often have dimensions of more than three thousand pixels in the vertical or horizontal. In other words, the photo is so large that even in some social networks this size can not be downloaded. For the normal quality of the images, it is sufficient to have dimensions of the order of 1000x600 pixels, and when saving use the format .jpg, rather than .png or .bmp. Such a photo and print it will be possible without any problems. However, "shovel" hundreds of photos is extremely inconvenient and difficult in time.

FastStone Image Viewer application

It's much easier to use the specialized utility FastStone Image Viewer. In addition to editing photos, she still has a lot of things.

So, for example, to quickly edit an entire folder that contains a home photo archive, you need to select it in the application window, select all files, and then use the "Send by e-mail" option, then in the new window set the desired compression options . The size of the photo should be set at 800x600 pixels, then remove the checkboxes from the "Save EXIF / IRTC data", "Add frame" options, etc. Setting up the backup also means renaming all the processed files (this is optional). Eventually, after a little waiting, the program will resize the photos and pack them into 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 the use of standard archivers, among which WinRAR, WinZIP, 7-Zip, etc., are worth mentioning separately.

This method involves standard compression of files and folders without actually changing the size of the images. Naturally, depending on the quality and initial size, compression can reach 20-95%. Nevertheless, such applications also have their advantages.

First of all, in search of an answer to the question of how to archive photos, it should be taken into account that in the presets you can set, say, the creation of a self-extracting archive, which, when opened, works like a regular "EXE" file, requesting only the location of the content retrieval.

On the other hand, you can customize the size of the future archive for some media such as CD / DVD-ROM, add files to already created archives, create multi-volume archives, etc. As they say, this method is the simplest. However, when unpacking the extracted files will occupy the same amount of space on the hard drive or removable media, as before.

Use of online services

In some cases, you can use specialized Internet resources that offer photo compression without loss of quality. Today they can be found quite a lot. 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 end of the processing process, and then downloads the result to his computer terminal. In principle, everything is simple, but the timing of such operations can greatly increase. It can be connected with the speed of Internet access or some unforeseen deviations in the work of the sites themselves. However, in the problem of how to archive a folder with photos, this approach can be called the easiest for lazy people. And the quality result is not always guaranteed.

Cloud storage

Very many users of the Internet prefer to use so-called "cloud" storage - services that offer to use disk space on remote servers. True, there may also be problems here. The fact is that not all such repositories have the functions of archiving data "on the fly." Even with such an opportunity, the time of uploading photos to the resource (upload) takes a lot of time. Even gigabyte material will be loaded long enough.

On the other hand, it can save photos from deletion or corruption due to damage to the hard drive of your own computer or a removable device in the form of a flash drive, not to mention optical discs.

The result

If you sum up the original result, in solving the problem, how to archive photos, you can identify several of the most acceptable options. As you already know, the simplest way is to use regular archivers. The archive will "weigh" much less than the original folder, but when you extract, the free space problem may appear again.

If there are not too many pictures, you can edit them in the Paint application, but the FastStone Image Viewer (or any similar program) looks the most attractive. Here, in fact, not only the resizing of photos is made, but also the packing in the archive. Thus, this package is the most functional. By the way, despite the seeming complexity of this software, it is not difficult to deal with it even to the user of the initial level of training, not to mention professionals for whom the application provides a fairly wide field of activity in terms of additional compression and archiving settings as separate files, so And whole photo albums with an impressive amount of data.