Compressing files and making archives

Select files, folders or both and press Compress. Nemi packs them into an archive and either downloads it or saves it into your workspace. Selecting a folder includes everything inside it, at any depth, with the folder structure preserved in the archive.

The originals are never replaced. An archive is a new file that appears beside them, so packing something up is always safe to undo by deleting the archive.

The formats#

ZIP, TAR, TAR.GZ, TAR.BZ2, TAR.XZ, TAR.ZST, and the single file containers GZ, BZ2, XZ and ZST. ZIP is the one to pick when somebody else has to open it; the TAR family compresses better and is what other developers will expect. You can also ask for more than one format in the same job, which produces one archive per format.

Unpacking an archive#

Select an archive already in your workspace, press Compress and switch to the extract side. Nemi creates a folder named after the archive, next to it, and unpacks into it. The archive itself stays where it is. Each archive you unpack counts as one compression.

• ZIP, TAR and TAR.GZ archives can be unpacked here.
• Formats whose contents cannot be measured before unpacking, which is BZ2, XZ and ZSTD in their single file form, are refused with a note asking you to unpack them on your own machine. That is a safety limit, not a missing feature: an archive that will not say how big it is can be a trap.
• An archive above 2 GB, or one that would unpack to more than 1 GB or more than 20,000 files, is refused for the same reason.
• Unpacking into a vault folder is refused, because the unpacked files would be readable and the point of a vault is that nothing in it is.
• The unpacked files count against your storage, so make sure there is room first.

Making a photo or a video smaller#

Zipping a JPEG or an MP4 barely helps, because those formats are already compressed. To genuinely shrink one, use Converting files instead and set the quality, the resolution or the bitrate in the conversion options. Re-encoding a video at a lower bitrate, or an image to WebP or AVIF, is where the real saving is.