Thread: BluBox

YOU MAY NEVER buyanother roll of film ever again, but going digital won't eliminate your photographic storage woes. Even mobile phones can pack a 5MP camera, and all those high-resolution snaps need megabyte after megabyte of hard -disk space.
And when you come to exchange an entire digital photo album across the net, you really can't expect the recipient to wait while their web connection wrestles with several hundred megabytes.

There's a simple solution to all this kerfuffie: compress the files and you'll not only save disk space - a more diminutive file is far more suitable for easy shar¬ing. BluBox offers such a solution for digital photos, using its own compression format to render the most gargantuan of image folders comparatively minuscule.



Testing BluBox's claims to offer swift and easy compression of up to 95 percent couldn't have been easier. The program's interface is straightforward and comes stocked with detailed yet largely unnecessary help files. You can simply drag¬and-drop individual images into a new folder within the program, or access one that you've already made.

Our original set of Jpegs took up 211MB of space and, with the program compressing to a medium setting, we were provided with an impressive 76MB .blu file. The same folder compressed on the maximum setting was reduced to just 12MB.
You wouldn't compress a set of highly detailed images quite so vicious1y, but the test surely proves the program's mettle. It's fast and effective, enables users to easily add password protection and can be used to view images after compression.