Handling .zip on iOS

Tech Support
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1

I need a bit of help with zipping large files in iOS through Shortcuts - hope you guys ‘n’ gals can help.

I’ve switched from macOS to iOS on an iPad Pro 10.5 but only with 64Gb since I rely heavily on the 200Gb iCloud plan, but… the iPad keeps some of the files I’ve been handling on the iPad instead of uploading to iCloud and delete the local file.

EDIT: it uploads the file to iCloud, but keeps the local copy as well.

So I created a “zip / unzip file” shortcut to save space, but the zipped file takes up the same amount of space as the original file.

Am I doing something wrong?

This is the shortcut I am using.

2

I’ve not done a lot of zipping and unzipping lately but as I recall some file types are often about the same while others reduced much more. But at the moment I’m not remembering which file types see the greater reduction.

3

So, it won’t have any effect on the I/O file whether I use one or the other format (other than zipped size)?

4

What kind of files are you zipping/unzipping? If it’s something that’s already compressed (most images and video, for example) then the zip file compression process is not going to be able to wring much, if any, size out of it.

5

It is primarily RAW photos taken with iPhone 7+ and 4K video shot on iPhone as well

6

Both of those are compressed, so compressing them again isn’t really going to make them any smaller. In fact, depending on the compression algorithm, it could end up making the files bigger.

1 Like
7

Okay - I actually didn’t know that :thinking:

Seems I’ll have to find a way to offload the files from the device then, somehow without deleting them from iCloud.

But thank you for the help