Question: storing digital images

Please pardon my ignorance. I have a folder containing 1.33 Gb in images. If I tell the computer to compress this folder, will it damage the images?

No- The computer "compression" is "lossless", so the data can be restored exactly. You may lose some speed accessing them since there is some calculation required to restore the information.

Depending on the images, there may not be much gain in"compressing" them since some image formats are already compressed.

Thank you!

You are welcome!

Canon CR2 files are as I understand it already in a lossless compressed format, this is why you get variations in file size with both image content and changes in ISO. The random noise in high ISO images is very hard to compress using any compression method. So running them through another layer of compression is not going to achieve much. The same applies to JPEG images, adding another layer of lossless compression is not going to save you much space. So personally unless you are using lots of uncompressed TIFF files there is virtually nothing to be gained by using Operating System level compression on the drive.

Alan

Thank you, BigAl. The files are JPGs. I tried the compression maneuver (making a zip file). It didn't save much space at all, and getting into the folder was a chore, as the capn predicted.

My purpose wasn't to reduce noise, it was to free memory. Downloading has got slow. Videos at cnn.com pause several times within a minute, although long YouTube videos play straight through. I don't know what's slowing things up.

If your images are jpegs, there are programs called jpeg optimizers that will reduce the file size while still preserving image quality.
That is, the reduction in IQ will be imperceptible to the human eye.

I know this is not what you asked about, but I thought I'd throw it out there.

This isn't what you asked, but I'll throw it out there anyway-

Best Buy (and others) had a sale on external USB hard drives- 2 Terabytes (TB) for $50 each. I bought 2 of them and "manually" mirrored them so if one goes bad, I still have everything on the other. They are powered by the USB port and are the size of a cigarette package. They act just like USB thumb drives.

I moved my pictures off the internal 1 TB drive to the new drives to make free space on the computer drive (and the back-up for my other files). Although the computer is using USB 2 ( USB 3 is a newer standard and supposed to be faster), I'm not seeing much of a performance hit in Lightroom, and I keep RAWs as well.

It's been working well for me the past few weeks, although other people may have other preferences to keep their photos.

Capn Jack wrote in post #18777304
This isn't what you asked, but I'll throw it out there anyway-

Best Buy (and others) had a sale on external USB hard drives- 2 Terabytes (TB) for $50 each. I bought 2 of them and "manually" mirrored them so if one goes bad, I still have everything on the other. They are powered by the USB port and are the size of a cigarette package. They act just like USB thumb drives.

I moved my pictures off the internal 1 TB drive to the new drives to make free space on the computer drive (and the back-up for my other files). Although the computer is using USB 2 ( USB 3 is a newer standard and supposed to be faster), I'm not seeing much of a performance hit in Lightroom, and I keep RAWs as well.

It's been working well for me the past few weeks, although other people may have other preferences to keep their photos.

Seems like we're both throwing a lot out there

I'm curious, these 2TB drives...are these the Western Digital Passport devices (or similar) ?
2TB for 50 bucks sounds like a great deal.

Perfectly Frank wrote in post #18777312
Seems like we're both throwing a lot out there

I'm curious, these 2TB drives...are these the Western Digital Passport devices (or similar) ?
2TB for 50 bucks sounds like a great deal.

The ones I bought are Western Digital, but there were a few brands out there. Staples had a similar deal, but Best Buy was a little cheaper and both were just as (in)convenient for me; their price even beat Amazon and WalMart! The ones I have are Western Digital "easystore"

I hope @OhLook doesn't mind the alternative suggestions! What works best for her depends on her workflow, budget, and so forth.

OhLook wrote in post #18777247
Thank you, BigAl. The files are JPGs. I tried the compression maneuver (making a zip file). It didn't save much space at all, and getting into the folder was a chore, as the capn predicted.

My purpose wasn't to reduce noise, it was to free memory. Downloading has got slow. Videos at cnn.com pause several times within a minute, although long YouTube videos play straight through. I don't know what's slowing things up.

Memory is t the same thing as hard drive space.
How much free space do you have on your hard drive?

Data on the drive won’t make video playback poor.

OhLook wrote in post #18777247
Thank you, BigAl. The files are JPGs. I tried the compression maneuver (making a zip file). It didn't save much space at all, and getting into the folder was a chore, as the capn predicted.

My purpose wasn't to reduce noise, it was to free memory. Downloading has got slow. Videos at cnn.com pause several times within a minute, although long YouTube videos play straight through. I don't know what's slowing things up.

How are you connecting to the internet? Slow connections may be anything from too many people on limited WiFi channels to the ISP having issues to malware on your computer sucking up all your bandwidth! I'm not suggesting any of those are the cause, but an looking for alternative solutions that may also solve your problem.

Jethr0 wrote in post #18777329
Memory is t the same thing as hard drive space.
How much free space do you have on your hard drive?

Data on the drive won’t make video playback poor.

Hmmm...I understand what you are trying to say, but please consider rephrasing that first statement as RAM != drive space.

BigAl007 wrote in post #18777178
Canon CR2 files are as I understand it already in a lossless compressed format, this is why you get variations in file size with both image content and changes in ISO. The random noise in high ISO images is very hard to compress using any compression method. So running them through another layer of compression is not going to achieve much. The same applies to JPEG images, adding another layer of lossless compression is not going to save you much space. So personally unless you are using lots of uncompressed TIFF files there is virtually nothing to be gained by using Operating System level compression on the drive.

Alan

They are not as compressed as they can be, and only sections of the CR2 might be compressed, the file as a whole isn't. There are many "buckets" of data inside the CR2 raw file.

The new Canon raw format is substantially smaller, thus they have found a way to compress the data more, but still lossless.

Jethr0 wrote in post #18777329
Memory is t the same thing as hard drive space.
How much free space do you have on your hard drive?

Data on the drive won’t make video playback poor.

I think you are heading down this road, but a full harddrive, especially one really fragmented can indeed slow the system down, once RAM is exhausted. Once the system has to page to the harddrive, nothing having consecutive pages of memory free will cause a slowdown. I don't like to max out my drives on my systems, once they hit about 60-70%, I start to offload files.