[thelist] compression / uncompression

Bob Meetin bobm at dottedi.biz
Fri Jan 18 16:30:58 CST 2008


Good afternoon now - and thanks.... I've been filtering through all the 
responses.  Sounds like I was incomplete with information but got the 
right answer anyway. 

Compression means different things to technical folks who work with this 
stuff regularly vs. non-techies. In this case he's mixed up the term 
compression with probably the automatic stuff that outlook does and 
confused it with 'transferring' an image through email.  I seem to 
recall him saying once that whenever you transfer images through email 
that there is a quality loss - I will go with wrong wrong wrong! Case 
closed.  Wrong is right....

Along the same lines zipping up a file or bunch of images with something 
like WinZip or command line zip should not impact quality.  So when the 
receiver uncompresses and opens the zip file all should be well in lala 
land.  On some UNIX servers there is 'compress' and 'uncompress'. 

When I talk about compression and images for the web that's the other 
ballgame which my client and probably 90% of folks don't know about -  
i.e. jpg is lossy, etc.  My mistake if I inadvertently led you down that 
path.  The fingers sometimes move faster than the mind. 

I have some useful file upload forms that I've set up for clients, 
however on shared servers they typically set up fair limits of about 
10MB to upload and/or post. Interestingly someone mentioned yousendit.  
They actually used it to send me a 17MB .mov file.  In any case I think 
for this situation no loss of data is occurring in the file transfer.  
AOL not involved here, so I can avoid that argument. 

The Outlook smooch???  Is there where Outlook attempts to compress (not 
lossy) or do whatever it must to send the file?  A client tried to send 
me something outrageous last week (which I never received) and the way 
she described it was that Outlook was attempting to break the file down 
into several pieces and send  as a bunch of attachments.  I was just a 
little curious about how a mail reader other than Outlook (Tbird in my 
case) magically fixes this on the receiving end.  This is not a gotta 
know....

Thanks, I am happy again...






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