Chemtable Software Forum

Hello,

I am evaluating the free version of Files Inspector 3.22. I see that, with the Pro version, I could recover many GB of disk space by replacing my JPEG files with losslessly compressed versions. Some aspects of the compression function are unclear to me though, due to the limitations of the free version. In particular, besides file size, how does the compressed version of a JPG file differ from the original?

1. Does the metadata (XMP, EXIF, IPTC, etc.) contained in the compressed JPEG exactly mirror that of the original JPEG? If there are any differences, what are they?

2. How are Windows file attributes affected? Do the 'Date Created' and 'Date Modified' attributes of the compressed JPG file differ from the original, or are they modified to match those of the original?

3. I understand that the lossless reduction can be 'Undone'. Assuming that the compressed file's 'Date Created' and 'Date Modified' attributes differ from those of the original, when the 'Undo' feature is used to convert the compressed version back to the original, are the 'Date Created' and 'Date Modified' attributes that were associated with the file prior to compression restored as part of the 'Undo' process?

I rely on the date information contained in JPG file attributes, for file sorting, for flagging file changes, and for basic chronological recordkeeping. While regaining all those GB of disk space would be valuable, if the files' 'Date Created' and 'Date Modified' attributes are changed as part of the compression process (whether or not the original file date attributes can be recovered by 'Undo'), I will have to weigh the impact of that.

David

Hello David,

Thank you for your interest in our product!

When performing the lossless compression of the images the metadata will be kept. We just tested: the Rating, Tags and Comment metadata items have not been removed after compressing the JPG file. At the same time, the 'Date Created' and 'Date Modified' attributes have been reset. Undoing the compression will not return them to the original states. During the compression undoing the original files are just restored from the Recycle Bin. But this does not lead to restoring the 'Date Created' and 'Date Modified' attributes, they will be still set to the current date.

Feel free to test the compression by yourself. I'll send you the short term key via the private messages.

File inspector lossless compression retains metadata such as, tags and comments but date created and date modified attributes are reset. Undoing compression doesn't restore original date attributes using these methods a lot of applications are available on internet as an example such as jpeg comressor it compresses images well by maintaining the image quality.