BluBox – The Digital Photo Compression Software That’ll Save Your Computer

Posted on 04. Apr, 2008 by admin in Photo Editing

If you take a photo these days it’s more than likely going to be on a digital camera.
This is great because it allows instant reviews of what you’ve taken but does pose the problem of what you do with all your photos.

What most of us do is bung them all on our computers which solves the problem of clearing the camera but leaves us with another problem.

A rapidly decreasing hard drive on our computers as these photos take up more and more space.
Then there’s the problem of when you want to send someone a photo. If it actually sends it takes forever and then there’s the possibility their email may not be powerful enough to download it the opposite end…

It’s all a bit depressing isn’t it!

Well there is some light on the horizon and it’s in form of a piece of software called Blubox that I’ve been testing.

This program may not be the most exciting piece of software you ever use but is incredibly useful as it compresses all your photos down to a few hundred kilobytes without losing any of the details.
Is it easy to use? Incredibly so. There’s lots of help available through the program but you don’t really need it as it’s been designed to be very simple to get the hang of.

You can compress file into one of two formats – a .zip flue or a .blu file. The former is one that most people will recognise but the latter is one specific to the program. This, as you may have guessed, means you can only send this format to someone who has a BluBox program to open it with.
Now this does sound like a bit of a blow but BluBox has this covered as they provide a free BluBox Viewer which people can download from their website to open the files which is a small compromise to make if it means they’ll actually get the photograph!

I found compressing the files easy and I like how you can still browse through the images once zipped which is something a lot of other programs don’t allow.

BluBox also lived up to its claims of maintaining the quality of the images as I compressed one of my photos to a ridiculously small size and saw no difference in quality once it was unzipped.

This is a great piece of software that any keen photographer should have purchased and installed on their computer asap especially as it’s only £19.99 direct from BluBox or £16.99 at Amazon.

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