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Blubox
Price: £23.49

Features
Performance
Ease of use
Value for money
Overall

Reviewed By: Andy Shaw

This review updated: 24/04/2008
Featured in magazine:
Issue 186
Manufacturer Contacts:
Supplier: Blubox
Web Address: www.blubox.com


With digital cameras getting more sophisticated and taking pictures at ever-increasing resolutions, photos are taking up a sizeable chunk of our hard disks. Traditional compression software isn't of much use: if you save your photos as JPEGs, as most digital cameras do, the images are already compressed and zipping them up does little to shrink their size. Blubox is offering a solution however, claiming to be able to shrink digital photos – even JPEGs – into zip-like archives and compress them by up to 95 per cent.

Features
If you're worried about the amount of space your photos are taking up, this may sound too good to be true. It gets better though. The software claims to not only squash your photos but it can encrypt them too, so only password holders can access them. The downside is that it's a proprietary compression format, so anyone you're looking to share files with would also need to have Blubox software installed, though a free viewer and unpacker is available if you can persuade your friends and relatives to run extra software on their computers.

Performance
In practice, the results were initially unimpressive. We started off by packing photos together in the format's 'lossless' setting. This ended up collecting our test batch of 42 photos into a file that was 20 per cent bigger than the photos themselves – a completely pointless exercise. Cranking the compression up saw things improve though. At its medium setting, we shrunk the batch of photos to 68 per cent of its original size. Increasing the setting to maximum, we squashed the photos down to just 14 per cent of their original size. We decompressed and reopened the images and close inspection showed plenty of evidence that they'd been shrunk, but only by zooming in by a significant degree.

Ease of use
So far so good, and the software is certainly easy to use. You can drag and drop photos into archives and view the images in them without extracting them. Where it starts to lose on ease of use is with its proprietary nature, returning to the issue that if you want to use the software to reduce image file sizes for emailing, you'll have to make sure that the person at the other end has the software or the free viewer installed too.

Value for money
There was one thing playing on our mind and that was how well it would compare to an image processor reducing image file sizes using the standard JPEG compression. Although your image quality will diminish, if you want to shrink a photo for emailing it can be a fair trade off. We used Adobe Photoshop Element's 'Save for Web' feature – because you can see the resulting file sizes – and reduced the size of a few photos to 14 per cent of the original. We found the results to be almost identical, the only difference being that the image is still a JPEG so your family and friends don't need specialist software to access it. So presuming you've already got a decent image editor, you could get similar, more flexible, results to Blubox without spending any more money.

More Compression tools reviews:

• Blubox
• WinRAR 3.62
• PKZip 9
• WinZip 11
• 7-Zip 4.42