Main Review

Compression is a straightforward way to ease the burden of multi-megabyte files, and is offered in several shapes and forms with Blubox. Laying claim to being the ‘worlds most advanced compression and imaging software for digital photographers’, Blubox offers two types of compression – binary, or lossless ‘zip’ compression, and image, or ‘lossy’ compression.

The ‘Binary’ mode offers just one setting, yet the ‘Image’ mode allows the user to compress at either ‘low’, ‘medium’, ‘high’ or ‘maximum’, with the final file or folder producing a Blubox archive file of respectively decreasing size. The software also contains 256-bit AES encryption to guarantee the security of personal images. ‘Image’ mode does result in the emergence of jpeg artefacts when compressed at the higher settings. However, this is a small price to pay for the convenience of up to a 95% reduction in file size that can prove invaluable when sending image in bulk and finest quality in non-imperative.

Blubox presents a simple user interface allowing a simple learning curve that even the novice-compressor can grasp easily. What’s more is that the .blu archives created can be read without the need of the reader to own the Blubox software thanks to the free Blubox viewer, downloadable from Blubox.com, and archived images can be previewed even when compressed at the highest setting.