compress pictures

[Matt Graham]

From: Michael Havens <bmike1 at gmail.com>
> I want to compress a bunch [of] pictures to put a bunch on my zip
> drive. What is the best program to use?

Most image formats are already compressed in some way.  JPEG, GIF, TIFF, and
PNG are almost always compressed.  Compressing an already-compressed data set
doesn't usually buy you very much at all, 1 or 2% if that.

> I was thinking 'zip' would be good

See above.  zip will work, though tar combined with bzip2 (or xz/lzma) may be
more space-efficient at the cost of it taking longer to compress and
uncompress the data.  That's "tar cjf images.tar.bz2 images/" or "tar cJf
images.tar.xz images/" to create compressed tarballs of everything in the
images/ dir.  Replace "tar cjf" with "tar xjf" to uncompress.  

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see