REVIEW: Blubox

Zipless picture compression

Blubox is an easy-to-use tool that quickly compresses and de-compresses digital photos for sharing over the internet.

Blubox uses what it calls the Blu format to offer a dramatic improvement to zip. It also allows users to make conventional zip archives. Using the software is simple – click on ‘New’, browse for images, give the archive a name and that is it.

In our test, we took three images of 1.8MB each and compressed them in both Blu and zip formats using medium compression and retaining their original dimensions.
The Blu archive reduced the overall file size by 2MB, whereas the zip archive reduced it by only 29KB. It is clear from our tests that Blubox offers significantly better compression of images than the zip format. However, compressed images are only useful if they can be de-compressed easily by the recipient.

To de-compress a Blubox archive, a free viewer program must be downloaded and installed on the recipient’s PC. Therefore, if users are emailing compressed images as a Blubox archive, they must be sure the recipient has the appropriate viewer.

Distributor: Blubox.com