Zipping without a zip utility
Combining files into an archive is a right click on a desktop and a genuine obstacle everywhere else. A managed work laptop with archive creation removed. A school Chromebook. A phone, where gathering several files from different apps into one archive is far more work than it should be. A borrowed computer where you would rather not install anything.
This page compresses in the browser tab. Select the files, choose how hard to compress, and download one archive. Nothing is installed and nothing is uploaded, which also means there is no size cap imposed by somebody else’s free tier.
Building an archive
- Drop your files onto the box or pick them. Any file type is accepted and there is no count limit.
- Choose a Compression level. Balanced is the sensible default.
- Run it and download the archive.
The compression levels are a real scale
The three options are not marketing tiers, they map onto genuine settings of the standard DEFLATE algorithm.
The fastest level does no compression at all. It packs the files end to end into the archive structure and nothing else, so the result is roughly the size of the inputs combined and is produced as fast as the files can be read. It is the right choice when everything inside is already compressed, since the other levels would spend time achieving nothing.
Balanced runs real compression at a middle setting. For text, source code, CSV, logs, spreadsheets and most documents the saving is substantial, and the time cost is imperceptible on anything but a very large batch.
Maximum pushes the same algorithm as hard as it goes. The extra saving over balanced is usually modest and the time cost is real, so it earns its place when the archive is going somewhere with a size limit rather than as a default.
What compresses and what does not
Compression works by finding repetition, so how much you save depends entirely on what is inside.
Text is enormously repetitive, so plain text, code, JSON, CSV, XML and logs frequently shrink to a fraction of their size.
Files that are already compressed have had their repetition removed already. JPEGs, PNGs, MP3s, most video formats and any file that is itself an archive will not shrink meaningfully at any level. Choosing maximum compression on a folder of photos wastes time for no benefit, which is precisely the case the fastest level exists for.
Folder structure, and why it is not there
A browser cannot see your folders. When you pick a file, the page receives its name and its contents and nothing else, with no path attached, regardless of how deeply nested it was on disk. Dropping a folder does not solve it either, since what arrives is not reliably walkable as a tree.
The consequence is that the archive is flat. Every file sits at the top level, and if you selected files from several folders they are now neighbours.
Where that matters, name collisions are handled properly rather than silently. Two different files sharing a name both survive, with the second gaining a numeric suffix before its extension, and the check runs across the whole selection rather than pairwise. If you genuinely need the folder tree preserved, your operating system’s own compress command is the right tool, because it has the file system access a web page does not.
Related archive tools
To go the other way and open an archive, Unzip Files is the direct counterpart and shares this tool’s naming logic. For the formats a fresh machine cannot open at all, RAR Extractor, 7z Extractor and TAR.GZ Extractor each handle one.
If you are bundling data files, JSON to CSV and Excel to JSON convert them first, and Duplicate File Finder is worth a pass before archiving a large batch. The rest are on the dev tools hub.
