With the introduction of digital cameras and mobile phones, people have started capturing a lot of photos, mainly because it costs virtually nothing unlike the analogue camera era. Digital cameras make it very easy to back up photos to an external source so that space on the camera is freed up. This is why many people tend to take a large number of photos.
Digital cameras and high-end phones produce photos that take a significant amount of space in the storage medium, these devices often run out of space. This article teaches how to optimize such photos and zoom through the process of moving them to a different medium with ease.
Identify and Group Similar Looking Photos
Use PictureEcho’s intelligent algorithm to clean up photos collection and save disk space.
Solution 1: Turn on the Drive Compression Feature
The Compress this drive to save disk space option in the Properties dialog compresses and decompresses the files on the fly when they are being used. By default, Windows 10 stores files in the file system as raw data. Even though it improves read and write speed in certain systems, it causes the hard disk drive to take up more space to store files.
Turning on this particular option makes the disk take up less space to store the files as they are compressed before being stored in the file system. This particular option is quite helpful for someone who has a faster CPU and a slow hard disk drive, as the CPU is used to decompress the files before they are being read.
Open up This PC.
Right-click the drive where the photos are stored and select Properties.
In the General tab, locate the Compress this drive to save disk space option, and select it’s checkbox. From now onwards, all the files will be compressed before they are written to the disk. It is recommended that this particular drive is dedicated for file archiving instead of being used regularly.
Solution 2: Convert Images to WebP Format
WebP is a modern image format that provides high quality and reduced size at the same time. It has been developed by Google and has been offered free of charge to help users optimize images. Initially, WebP worked only on Chrome and Chromium-based web browsers, but now even Windows 10 supports viewing WebP images with the help of a codec. This means WebP images can also be used on desktop computers, not just on the web. By default, Windows is unable to read WebP extension, but when the WebP codec is installed, it decodes the WebP data for Windows and its image viewers to read, and thereby any inbuilt image viewer can display WebP images.
Install the WebP Codec from this location:
https://codecpack.co/download/WebP-Codec-for-Windows.html
Download the following batch script:
https://github.com/donqq/Convert-Bulk-Images-to-WebP
Download libwebp from this location:
https://storage.googleapis.com/downloads.webmproject.org/releases/webp/index.html
Libwebp package contains the required tools to convert any image format to WebP format.
Extract the archive to any location and then place the batch script described above inside the bin folder.
Create a folder called Images in the bin folder, copy all the images to be converted to the Images folder and then execute the script. While the script is being executed, the WebP images of the respective images are created in a subfolder called the WebP folder. Make sure the WebP folder doesn’t exist in the Images folder before the script is executed.
Solution 3: Use Robocopy to Improve the backup speed
Traditionally the files are copied on Windows using the Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V method. Even though this method is convenient in virtually every use case, it might not be very suitable if the CPU supports many threads and the system has plenty of system memory at its disposal. The traditional inbuilt copy & paste function copies one file at a time. It causes the files to be copied slower, as the CPU can process data faster than the data being read from the hard disk drive. The copying performance can be significantly low if the hard disk is mechanical instead of an SSD or an Optane drive. The mechanical drives have a slower read and write speed. So it is recommended to use an alternative like Robocopy to transfer files around instead of the traditional copy and paste method.
Robocopy is available free of charge for every Windows user and supports multiple threads. This means if the computer has a newer Intel or an AMD processor with 16 cores and 32 threads, it can process 32 files simultaneously instead of 1 file at a time. It drastically improves the performance and speeds up the images backup time even on slow mechanical drives. However, this method is only suitable if the system has multiple threads on its CPU and plenty of system memory.
Launch the Command Prompt (CMD) from the start menu. It would be better if the CMD is opened in administrator mode to prevent security errors. To open it with elevated access, right-click CMD and select Run as administrator option.
Type the following command in Command Prompt. Robocopy requires several parameters to make it truly useful.
E parameter commands to copy subdirectories in the Source directory.
Z parameter commands to copy files in restartable mode, so that if the copy process is stopped for some reason, it could be restarted again.
R:X specifies how many times to retry in case the copying failed.
W:X specifies how long to wait in seconds before retrying. If a large number of images are copied over a network to a different drive, both R and W parameters come in handy, as if there was any problem with the network, the copying won’t be cancelled. MT parameter specifies how many threads are to be used.
The number of threads the current processor supports can be viewed in the Performance tab of Task Manager. The Task manager can be opened with Ctrl + Shift + Esc on Windows 10 and Ctrl + Del in older versions of Windows. Replace the C:\Source with the source directory and replace the C:\Destination with the directory where the files are to be transferred.
robocopy “C:\Source” “C:\Destination ” /E /Z /R:3 /W:2 /MT:2
