Decrease Picture Size with Photo Vacuum Packer

Digital photos take up large space and so keeping those in original form will waste much valuable disk space. Photo Vacuum Packer is a kind of software that uses the following methods to reduce disk usage with digital photographs.

1. Find duplicates: (optional) Space on your disk may be occupied by duplicate images or entire folders. PVP will warn you about them and let you decide whether to copy them to the destination folder or not.
2. Repack: Non-optimally compressed images occupy much more space than necessary. Unfortuntely, most of digital cameras produce such photos. Repacking makes them occupy less space, while keeping original dimensions.
3. Resize: (optional) Newer cameras can create images large enough to print a jumbo poster. While focusing purely on megapixels, the sensor quality is often neglected, which results in high-resolution images with lots of noise. Photo Vacuum Packer can, if you wish, quality resample the photos to a lower resolution, to reduce the digital noise, make images occupy less disk space, speed up displaying, speed up uploading to internet sites, and save on backup media.
4. Change format: (optional) Pictures in BMP format occupy much more space than JPEG pictures of equal dimensions. Unless there's a special reason to keep them in the original format, converting them to JPEG can reduce their size approximately 20 times. Note that if image contains transparency information or 8-bit palette it will be lost during conversion. If it contains multiple images, only the first one will be kept.

Features & Specifications

Installation

Installer is small [vacuum-2010.3-setup.exe ; 1.10 Mb] and is not digitally signed.
Installation went fast without the installation of unwanted software.
Installation requires 2.4 Mb of disk space.
No Desktop or Quick Launch icon is created after installation but the software can be launched after installation or through start menu entry.
Runs well on Windows XP, Vista and 7, both 32 and 64 bit.

GUI and Usage

The software offers a Wizard like GUI which offers easy to follow instructions.
Step 1: Browse for folders containing digital images. Shows the number of optimizable files, which is not necessarily the same as the number of files in the input folder. Supports drag-and-drop, can include sub folders.

Step 1

Step 2: Searches for duplicate files in that folder and allows you to take actions.

Step 2

Step 3: You will be able to set output image quality (High or Standard), limit image size, convert images of other formats to JPEG (since JPG images are approximately 20 times smaller than BMPs and uncompressed TIFFs.), Removing mete-data or JPEG files etc.

Step 3

Image size can be adjusted according to the following.

Preset Image Size

Step 4: Here you will be able to assign the output folder location (default is Documents folder).
Step 5: Now the software will start scanning for the files. The progress Window lists the

Step 5

Step 6: The result window, lists space saved, optimization time etc information.

Step 6

The software uses minimal resources at idle time but moderately high resources during optimization.

Resource Usage at Idle Time

Resource Usage during Image Optimization

Offline html help file is very detailed.

My Verdict

Photo Vacuum Packer is an all in one tool for managing disk usage with digital photographs and it does so by checking all possible way by which a digital photograph can take up valuable disk space. I found the software very comprehensive.