Compressed folder not compressing image files

[needhelp]

Hope I am in the right forum for this one.

I got Win ME and yesterday wanted to email some pictures to my friend and the files that I wanted to send was in one folder and abotu 25Mbyte all up so I decided to zip the files for emailing to speed things up, however, when I finished zipping the folder and checked its size, I was surprised to find that it was still about the same size as the original folder (about 10Kbytes smaller)
I tried this several times with the same result. I tried it with just data files and it worked just fine with those but when I tried it with the picture files, no success. The pictures are JPEG format Dont know if that makes any difference.
Tried the same thing with WinZip and the same thing. Little or no reduction in file size.
If this is normal, is there some other program out there that can reduce them for sending by email.

[mike breck]

Hi needhelp,

I think your problem is normal. Text files and BMP files will compress very well.

However, as JPEGs and GIFs are already compressed, I don't think you can reduce the sizes very much by using WinZip. However, it does make it convenient for grouping the images for sending.

I think the only way you could reduce the size of the JPEGs is by optimising each image in an image editor; but, ofcourse, the more you optimise the image, the less the image quality would be.

Quite a job if you have to go thro 25MB of images.

So unless someone knows of a better way, you either have to send it as one large attachment or split the images into more manageable WinZip files and email them separately.

HTH