BatchFoxIf you've ever right-clicked a folder of RAW files and hit "Compress," you already know how this ends. The zip comes out barely smaller than the folder, it took forever, and now you can't even preview what's inside it.
For as long as I can remember, I've needed to know how things work. I spent a lot of my childhood taking things apart just to put them back together. Fast forward to today: I'm a software engineer, a photographer, a cybersecurity professional, a dad, and a full-time problem solver who still can't stop pushing the envelope. And my love for photography came with a problem that kept getting bigger, and more expensive, every year.
Zip barely making a dent in my RAW files drove me crazy. It sent me down a rabbit hole trying to figure out why. Here's what I found.
RAW files are mostly noise, and noise doesn't zip
Zip and 7-Zip work by finding patterns that repeat. Text is full of them. So are spreadsheets and most program files.
A RAW file is different. It's a record of what every single pixel on your sensor measured. Even a clean blue sky isn't clean at that level. Every pixel reads a little differently, because light and electronics are both a little random. To a zip tool that looks like a file with almost nothing repeating in it. It tries its best and gets almost nothing.
That's why zipping uncompressed RAW only shaves off a little, and zipping RAW your camera already compressed gives you back pretty much the same size you started with.
When it finally clicked for me, it was kind of simple: zip saves space by spotting the same slice of pie twice, and in a RAW file no two slices are ever alike.
A text file
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness
The marked words have all been seen before. Zip stores them once and points back.
A RAW file
Nothing here has been seen before, so there is nothing to point back to.
The usual fixes, and what they cost you
Shoot compressed RAW. Great for new photos. It does nothing for the years of files already sitting on your drives, and some compressed modes throw data away to get there.
Convert to DNG. It can save real space. But the file you end up with isn't the file your camera wrote anymore. For a lot of people that's fine. If you ever need the original, for a client, a contest, or just your own peace of mind, you'd have to keep the original too, and then what was the point?
Zip it anyway. You keep your originals, but you barely save anything and you can't browse it.
What I actually wanted
I wanted my space back AND my exact original files back, with proof.
So that's what I built BatchFox Archive to do. On the Sony files we've promoted so far it makes them up to 71.69% smaller, and most shots land around half. When you restore on the default Exact setting you get your original file back byte for byte, and BatchFox checks it with a SHA-256 fingerprint so you don't have to take my word for it.
Two things matter to me as much as the number:
- You can check it yourself. SHA-256 is a standard fingerprint, and Windows can make one without any software from me. Fingerprint the original, archive it, restore it, fingerprint what came back. If they match, it's the same file.
- Getting your photos back is always free. Restore works on every plan, even after the beta. I'm never holding anyone's photos hostage.
Try it on your own shoots
BatchFox is in beta and I'm looking for photographers to run it on real work and tell me what happens. Sign up at batchfox.app, it comes straight to me.
So, how much of your drive is RAW files right now?