Space. The final frontier…
No, no, i’m not captain kirk and this is not the beginning of another Star Trek movie. The space i’m talking about is your hard disk space and opposed to real space which is endless and keeps on growing as far as I know, our hard disk space is limited.
Yes, I know that you can buy as much space as you need but not everyone can afford that and in any case, camera sensors are just getting bigger and as a result the file sizes are growing just the same.
Having a big external drive is without a doubt a must have for just about anyone these days, not only pro photographers. I’m not a pro photographer, this is still a hobby for me but the space the photos I shoot take is enormous. The RAW files that the Sony NEX-7 produce are around 25 MB and the JPEGs that I create from them are usually around the 5 MB on average.
It doesn’t sound like much but when you are using a Macbook Pro with an SSD drive that is only 256 GB big you really need to save on space and these little 5 MB files can add up quite fast.
This is where JPEGmini comes in.
JPEGmini allows you to reduce the size of your images by up to 5 times, while keeping their original quality and JPEG format. And you won’t believe how much space this is going to save you.
Yes, I know. It won’t reduce the size of your RAW files which take most of you space but it will reduce the size of all the JPEGs you create from your RAW files and when you add it all up, it can really save you TONS of hard disk space.
The people over at JPEGmini have a solution for everyone, from the home user to the pro photographer and even for those running photo intense websites.
For just $19.99 it is simply a steal and should be a no brainer for anyone that is taking photos and wants to save some hard disk space.
How much space can JPEGmini save?
As you can see in the screenshot above, it can save a lot of space and I’m not even half way through all my photos.
I’ve recently moved to JPEGmini PRO which works much faster and more importantly comes with a Lightroom plugin so whenever I export photos they are reduced automatically which saves me time as I don’t have to drag and drop them manually after the export is done.
JPEGmini PRO is not a must and it isn’t exactly cheap as they priced it at $149 but it saves me time, it saves me tons of HD space and overall, it saves me money so it is well worth it for me.
Here’s a thought that just came up; If they will be able to create an iPhone app that automatically reduces the size of the photos you are taking with your iPhone I think it would be a big hit as iPhone space is much more limited than HDD space and can’t get bigger while the camera sensors and files sizes are only going up.
If you’re still not convinced than just go and check it out yourself with their free web app.