Compression

All of this talk about how large digital image files can be has made me thing about ways around the hugeness of my image files. I’m the mother of a beautiful, and photogenic, little boy. All of the images I have of him could probably fill several photo albums. All of these images take up tons of valuable space on my hard drive that could be used for more pictures of my little angel. Even with deleting the images I don’t love and then defragging my computer to make more accessible room out of my previously ridiculously fragmented hard drive, I still need more room.

This is where compression comes in. Unlike the compressing going on in the picture above, compressed digital images retain their original shape. There are two types of compression: Lossy and Lossless. Lossy means you lose some information (though you probably wouldn’t be able to tell most of the time) and Lossless means no information is lost. Those two types of compressions come in multiple file type flavors such as GIF, JPG and TIFF.

A lot of information, I know, and I’ve only touched the tip of the compression iceberg. What you need to remember is, if you have a lot of large digital image files you need to look into compressing them. It will save you tons of disc space and let you keep more of the images you love without having to buy a computer just for your digital images.

Photo Credit P.C.W.

June 17th, 2009 by birdievogel | Posted in Large Files | (0)