Photo compressing and space saving...

[razer121]

Hello all have recently reloaded windows on the rig, But my external is a right mess! i've alot of duplicate photos and loads of space needed...so does anyone know of a decent program to use to sort the photos into sub folders and such?

Plus ive a back up of my steam games, this is pretty large! we are talking in the 200gb! What is the best way to compress them without the high risk of corrupting them? thanks!

[GoNz0]

steam backup is compressed, all you will do is waste a day trying to save 1% space, best bets to ditch the backup and take a copy of the folder, HDD space is cheap, i opted to ditch a 1tb for 2tb as i lost faith in my NAS after losing 100's of gb of none backed up films.

as for pics, open the lot in one folder, then use the sort options for dates and cut and paste into folders is one option, not sure if picassa would do it for you ?

[razer121]

Hm so what of my old games and such that ive downloaded (legit ones of course!) crysis 2 is an example, im not going to play this game but have it downloaded and ideally want to compress it down for when i do decide to play it (if i ever do!) and ive not done a normal steam back up lol i just copied the folder contents that i needed, so would you say id be wasting time trying to compress my files with winrar for instance?

[GoNz0]

you will not get a lot of space back from modern games as a lot of the code is already compressed. games like l4d and tf2 change content so much u may as well ditch the backups

[razer121]

Ah...well scrap that idea then! guess i will have to buy a bigger external lol

Now onto the photos

[GoNz0]

if the pics are jpegs they are also already compressed, any more and you lose quality, winrar wont do much to those either.