Let me show you how you can compress and decompress files on your Mac in this quick tutorial.
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Compress a file
It’s very easy to compress a file, group of files, or even folders using a simple command in the Finder on your Mac. This is also known as zipping the files because the zip format is mostly used for compression. Just as easy you can also decompress any zip file that you receive by email or download.
So compressing a file is pretty easy. All I need to do is use the Context menu which I can get to with a two finger click on my trackpad or by Control clicking on a file or if you are using a mouse then it is the right click menu
.. here in the menu I get the option to Compress. If I select that I will get the same file there but with .zip extension after it. You can see it has compressed it a little bit too. So instead of 1,5 Mb to 1,4 Mb. It’s not much but better than nothing!
Compress multiple files
Now if I want to do that with multiple files it works exactly the same. I can select many different files by clicking on them while holding the command button. I can select them with the cursor or press command + A to select all files in the folder. After you have the selection follow the same instructions as before = right click any of them and select compress. It will be named Archive.zip. But you can easily rename it.
Decompress Files
Now to decompress files it’s even easier. Just double click on the file like you’re going to open it. It will actually unzip by itself using the Archive Utility and a folder with the same name as zip file will appear on the bottom of the same folder.
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Archive Utility Preferences
You can edit preferences for compressing files in the archive utility app. Search for it using spotlight (Command + Spacebar) of Launchpad.
Once you open it from the first menu on top of your screen select preferences
As you can see here you’ve got more options than the simple double click to decompress or Control click to compress a file. You can set a location for expanded files to go into different location than it is the original zip file. You can automatically have the file moved to the bin or even deleted right away.
When creating an archive you can also set a location for the file. By default it will appear in the same folder but you can create your own folder for compressed files and be saving them there.
You can also choose format for compressing. You have three options here. Compressed archive, regular archive or zip file.
Why to Compress?
There are 2 main reasons you may want to compress something. One is to be able to send it somebody over email without any complications. Sometimes email apps or even downloading from a web browser can cause problems with certain type of file.
Also sometimes you may want to send multiple files to somebody and it’s easier to send one zip file than whole bunch of files as attachments.
Of course the other reason is that it compresses the files a bit. So it can make things smaller. Well the size for compressions is going to be always different. Images are already pretty compressed. jpeg is a compressed image format so you may find that zipping up a jpeg saves almost no space.
But compressing word processing documents and some other types of documents may actually reduce the file size by quite a bit and it’s also handy to organise things better by putting them into a single file.
This is useful if you use the Archive Utility to actually archive files. So zipping files up isn’t just for sending to others.
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