Compressing photo folders to save space?

In an effort to make some more room in my computer without getting rid of old photoshoot pictures, would it be a good idea to compress the folders? I have TIFF and JPEG photos in them, and I don't want to delete all of them, especially since some are of my family members. I'm just wondering if that in any way makes the files lose quality?

Jpgs are already compressed so you might not find much, if any, additional space by compressing them. External hard drives are cheap and getting bigger all the time.

If you use Photoshop, import the .TIF files and save them as .PSD (Photoshop) files. The files are smaller than .TIF and just as versatile as long as you have Photoshop.

You can still compress the folder(s) that hold images, but that will take a long time to do and you risk the system having a problem during the process. Before you compress a folder, copy everything to another drive. You could have the target folder(s) for the copy marked to be compressed and that way you wouldn't risk the originals' integrity.

Naraly wrote in post #17163777
In an effort to make some more room in my computer without getting rid of old photoshoot pictures, would it be a good idea to compress the folders? I have TIFF and JPEG photos in them, and I don't want to delete all of them, especially since some are of my family members. I'm just wondering if that in any way makes the files lose quality?

Over time, we who take photos have to make choices about how to store/organize our photos!

As was mentioned, using an external drive will help a lot, although I'd also suggest another that you use for backup. Take your time, plan things out, because "things" do tend to cost money$$!

Ok thanks everyone I think i'll just get an external hard drive as suggested!

Naraly wrote in post #17164431
Ok thanks everyone I think i'll just get an external hard drive as suggested!

Yeah, I use an external drive for my "library", long-term storage for a collection of 50kpics, and then I use my faster internal "data" drive for short-term processing, before moving the pics over to the external.

But, like I inferred, I have another external drive that I occasionally hook up to do backups.

Remember that you can use lossless compression on TIFF files if you want. You can even choose between LZW or ZIP as your compression algorithm. Actually you can use JPEG compression with TIFF files too, but I really don't see much point to that. If it works with 16 bit files with layers and transparency that would be interesting. It would also depend on how much more compression you could get over ZIP/LZW.

Alan

I was looking for turntable today at Walmart, also asked if they still developing film and walked by HDDs shelf.
3TB is slightly above $100 !

Naraly wrote in post #17163777
In an effort to make some more room in my computer without getting rid of old photoshoot pictures, would it be a good idea to compress the folders? I have TIFF and JPEG photos in them, and I don't want to delete all of them, especially since some are of my family members. I'm just wondering if that in any way makes the files lose quality?

Compressing existing files into a ZIP archive (or other such non-photo-specific file compression format) DOES NOT change the data in the file, so you won't lose any image quality. This is "lossless" compression. It's different than jpeg compression, in which some data is discarded or estimated, in order to make the file smaller - this is "lossy" compression. You can safely zip up all your files without worrying about making them worse.

The only significant downside is that the images have to be decompressed/unzipped before you can use them again.

The howstuffworks and wikipedia pages explain it better than I can.
http://en.wikipedia.or​g/wiki/Data_compressio​n
http://computer.howstu​ffworks.com/file-compression.htm

kf095 wrote in post #17165564
I was looking for turntable today at Walmart, also asked if they still developing film

if they're anything like the ones here they just send them to a fuji lab, better off cutting the middle man and searching for a lab yourself.

kf095 wrote in post #17165564
I was looking for turntable today at Walmart, also asked if they still developing film and walked by HDDs shelf.
3TB is slightly above $100 !

I got this one - its pretty cool.