Then and Now - file compression

I owned my first PC in 1984. It was an IBM XT, it came with 128 KB of RAM, a 360 KB double-sided 5¼ inch floppy disk drive, and a 10 MB Seagate hard drive. The internet was not really available to the public yet; however, it was available to some institution and government agencies.

The early 1990s marks the beginning of the modern Internet. We had internal modems with Ethernet connection to phone lines. Window replaced DOS and graphics were much more common, but the images came up very slowly so web developers and designers had to limit the number and size of the graphics displayed.

Today we have much faster processors, high speed modems and fast graphic cards. We have high speed connection and can stream video and conduct webinars. So does file size still matter?

Yes, file size still matters. Saving megabytes wherever possible helps you save time on the upload and the person on the other end save time on the download. However, I believe that if you have a really nice photograph you want to share and don't want to sacrifice quality, it's not a sin to use a larger file size. Do I mean megabytes? No.. but a few hundred Kb's isn't going to slow down on most devices.

I use Photoshop as a compression tool for my images. It's very simple to use and there are lots of options for different file sizes and types. However, there are many other apps that will do much of the same thing. Just enter "image compression software" in your search engine and you will see that there are lots of them.

Dan