I'm looking for a file compression utility. I've never used them before. But as pictures and videos get larger I'm more interested. Also, looking for one that other mac and pc users can just 'click on', and file will uncompress, without having to install the same utility that I'm using. I'm running latest version of win 10.

Usually compressing video or pictures results a different file in other words it can't be uncompressed on the other end. It is just smaller less quality. If you want to share these types of files at full quality cloud sharing works like Dropbox and similar.One Drive can also work.

Thank you John. I understand.

A lossless compressor will compress an item & should be able to restore it - exactly as it was.

That said, a lossless compressor is generally not very effective (as in very little to no file size savings) on "video" (say a .flv or mp4) or a "picture" (say a .jpg or .png).


Video or images can be transcoded into other formats or with other constraints that may result in smaller file sizes, but will always result in quality loss compared to the original.

And that type of operation is typically time consuming (often quite time consuming), though can be of benefit if you're OK with the time & the quality loss. (Similarly some video, generally shot at very high quality, can be made quite a bit smaller, with quite acceptable quality loss. Some video, simply has a higher bitrate only so that it can claim to be "HD" or some such meaning tag (where in actuality, the video is no better quality then a "360" or "480" of the same clip.)

There is no magic bullet to that kind of thing, & often needs experimentation.