File compression shrinks your documents, photos, and videos so they take up less storage space and move faster when you share them online. You might compress files to email a folder of photos, back up your computer, or make room on a full hard drive. The trade-off is straightforward: smaller files mean less storage, but you need to know which compression methods preserve your original quality and which ones don't.
These articles walk you through the practical questions: what file types compress well and which ones don't, how to create an archive that keeps everything organized, what happens to your data during compression, and how to open files someone else compressed and sent to you. You'll learn the difference between lossless compression—which keeps every bit of your original file—and lossy compression, which removes some data to make files even smaller.