{"id":18383,"date":"2026-04-11T13:35:38","date_gmt":"2026-04-11T11:35:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/da-software.net\/?p=18383"},"modified":"2026-04-11T13:35:38","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T11:35:38","slug":"less-storage-same-memories-da-photooptimizer-compresses-your-photo-collection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/da-software.net\/en\/2026\/04\/less-storage-same-memories-da-photooptimizer-compresses-your-photo-collection\/","title":{"rendered":"Less storage, same memories \u2013 DA-PhotoOptimizer compresses your photo collection"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Smartphone photos eat up storage \u2013 here&#8217;s how we solved the problem<\/p>\n<p>Anyone who takes a lot of photos with their smartphone knows the issue: camera quality keeps improving with every new generation \u2013 and file sizes grow right along with it. A single photo from an iPhone or a current Android device can easily reach 5\u20138 MB, sometimes even more. As long as it&#8217;s just a handful of holiday shots, that&#8217;s hardly noticeable. But if you regularly back up your photos to a NAS and accumulate thousands of images over time, you&#8217;ll eventually notice: storage is running low.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s exactly what prompted us to write a small tool: <strong>DA-PhotoOptimizer<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/da-software.net\/photooptimizer\/screenshot_en_1.webp\"\n     alt=\"DA-PhotoOptimizer \u2013 Main window\"\n     style=\"max-width: 100%; height: auto; display: block; margin: 10px 0;\"><\/p>\n<p>The idea is straightforward: JPEG images can be compressed significantly without any noticeable loss in quality \u2013 and if you&#8217;re only viewing your photos on screen or printing them occasionally, you don&#8217;t really need a full 50-megapixel file. DA-PhotoOptimizer recursively scans a folder structure and compresses all JPEG files according to your settings: you can define a maximum resolution, adjust the JPEG quality \u2013 or simply specify a scaling percentage to resize all images proportionally.<\/p>\n<p>One thing that was important to us: <strong>don&#8217;t blindly shrink everything<\/strong>. Small images that already have a low resolution are automatically skipped. There&#8217;s little point in compressing a photo that&#8217;s already 400\u00d7300 pixels. The tool recognises this and simply leaves those files alone.<\/p>\n<p>Before any file is touched, we recommend using the <strong>dry-run mode<\/strong>: it shows you exactly which files would be processed and how much storage you could save \u2013 without modifying a single file. Only once you&#8217;re happy with the preview do you start the actual processing.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/da-software.net\/photooptimizer\/size.webp\"\n     alt=\"Before\/after \u2013 reduced from 2.02 GB to 949 MB\"\n     style=\"max-width: 100%; height: auto; display: block; margin: 10px 0;\"><\/p>\n<p>In our test with a real photo folder \u2013 490 images, 42 subfolders, typical smartphone shots \u2013 we reduced the folder from <strong>2.02 GB to 949 MB<\/strong>. That&#8217;s around 53 % less storage, with photos that still look great afterwards.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/da-software.net\/photooptimizer\/screenshot_en_2.webp\"\n     alt=\"DA-PhotoOptimizer \u2013 Results table\"\n     style=\"max-width: 100%; height: auto; display: block; margin: 10px 0;\"><\/p>\n<p>After processing, DA-PhotoOptimizer displays a clear results table listing all processed files \u2013 including before and after file sizes. If you optimise regularly, you can save your preferred settings as a preset and reuse them next time with a single click.<\/p>\n<p>DA-PhotoOptimizer is <strong>free freeware<\/strong> and runs on Windows and Linux. No user account, no telemetry. The only requirement is Java 17 or newer.<\/p>\n<p>Download and more information: <a href=\"https:\/\/da-software.net\/en\/da-photooptimizer\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">DA-PhotoOptimizer<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Smartphone photos eat up storage \u2013 here&#8217;s how we solved the problem Anyone who takes a lot of photos with<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18382,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-software-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/da-software.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/da-software.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/da-software.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/da-software.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/da-software.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/da-software.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18383\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/da-software.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/da-software.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/da-software.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/da-software.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}