Can You Compress Photo RAW Files to Save Space?
Introduction I only started photography as a hobby about a year ago, and already I have about 50gb in my photo library. I shoot RAW, and evidently RAW photos take up a lot of space. I decided to test whether it was possible to compress these files to save space. Specifically, I wanted to know if I could use a compressed archive, like a ZIP file, to reduce the size on disk of my photo library. I'd like to specify that I'm a Nikon user; all of my RAW files are in the 14-bit NEF format from a Nikon D5600. Each file takes up about 25mb. There are only a few different lossless general purpose compression algorithms. There's a few buzzwords in there, but basically that means programs that will compress any given file where the original file is recoverable, no data is lost. There are 3 commonly used algorithms: bzip, gzip, and lzma. I ignored gzip since gzip is optimized for speed and not size. I ran a variation of bzip and lzma on 3 sets of 10 NEF files to determine how...
