zipping

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whenever I zip something, it's only shrunk in size by a tiny fraction. I'm using Winzip.

Is there something I'm not doing or doing wrong?

Are there any high-compression zip programs out there that compress way better than winzip?

You are zipping images and videos, aren't you? They're already compressed.

ohhhh.

nothing I can do then, hmm?

It depends. Jpegs are already as good as you're going to get. If you have mpegs that aren't in Divx or MP4 format you can do something for them. I'm not familiar with the programs for doing that anymore. 300 gigabyte hard drives go for under a hundred dollars.

There is also the idea of reducing the resolution of videos if you're OK with that. It depends on the application. Your Mp4 player obviously doesn't need full resolution.

A lot depends on what kind of images or videos you are trying to compress.

is there a way to convert all my jpgs to a smaller MB format like gif?

bzip2 and possibly 7z (aka 7zip) tend to be more efficient at the expense of being a lot slower. However, it's diminishing returns for already-compressed images and video, since general purpose compressors (as used in things like winzip, which don't know anything about what they're compressing) cannot possibly compete with special purpose compression (as used to compress images and video, where the compressor knows about the thing its compressing)

dont go from jpg to gif. gif only have 256 colors and will look terrible. You will see banding in the image.

If the jpgs are photos of people and other organic things, then jpg is the best format for them. If the image is very linear, such as screen captures of windows, such as WP, then png will be tiny.

you can convert them to use a lower resolution or lower quality jpgs which is probably the fastest way to get them smaller.

if you want something more sophisticated you can convert them to JPEG 2000 which is a newer image format and is somewhat more efficient meaning better quality per file size. but not a lot of tools support it. and you'll always suffer some quality loss converting from one format to another like that.

don't convert your jpgs to gif, they'll look like crap. reduce resolution/quality if you want smaller jpgs.

you can try converting your jpgs to PNG, but I doubt you'd save very much space. The exception is if these jpgs are drawings, text, animation, or other block colors, where PNG is vastly more efficient.

GIF is reserved for (graphics interchange format) which means those little animations such as some of these smiley's.
JPEG and MPEG Layer 3 use a compression technique that leaves only either lowering the resolution to something so low that it can't be watched with visual pleasure or lower the sound quality to 128Kbps and set at either 11KHz or 22KHz as anything higher the human ear CAN NOT hear and therefore a waste
Best resolutions are those that match 4:3 ratio or 16:9 so an example of a decent 4:3 ration would be 512x384 this is a good resolution to have.

Most videos now use a compression technique that I see as bad that I would prefer the standard AVI to be brought back in which every frame is saved and as a result used more space - but much more clearer and no partial picture loss.

If you really need compression, here is a good site:
STUFFIT
They have decent free trials.

IRFanview and Paint.net let people manipulate still photographs well. If you have a lot of photographs that were scanned at 300 DPI resolution you reduce file size by reducing the resolution and telling the program to maintain the apparent size. Reducing the resolution to 100 dots per inch makes the file nine times smaller. If you have a GIF and convert to JPEG it shrinks still further. Changing a bitmap to a GIF or JPEG shrinks the file size tremendously. GIF loses no information and JPEG loses some information. JPEG is pretty much no good for scanned documents.