ZIP Compress and Extract

📖 What this does

Sending a folder of material to a colleague means installing an archiver, right-clicking, waiting. Receiving an archive and only wanting to know whether one file is inside means extracting everything and deleting most of it. This does both halves in the browser. Under Compress you multi-select or drop a batch of files, pick a level, and a ZIP is built on the spot with the raw size, the packed size and the saving shown immediately. Under Extract you open a ZIP, get every entry listed by name, preview text files without saving them first, then take one file or the whole lot. Nothing is uploaded and there is no software to install.

✨ Features

• Compression level runs from 0 to 9. Level 0 stores without compressing - fastest, and the size barely moves. Level 9 is smallest and noticeably slower. Around 6 suits everyday documents.
• Multi-select and drag-and-drop both work, up to 200 files, and any entry can be removed from the list individually, so a mistake does not mean starting over.
• When packing finishes you get raw size, packed size, percentage saved and elapsed time, so you can tell whether it was worth doing.
• Extraction lists every entry sorted by name with the folder path kept in the name, and the last path segment becomes the saved filename.
• Text files preview inline up to 4000 characters, so there is no save-then-open round trip. Binary files are labelled as such rather than shown as garbage.
• Files that would collide by name inside the archive are renamed automatically, so one does not silently overwrite another.
• Both tabs keep their state when you switch between them, so you can pack a batch, check an archive you were sent, then come back and download the file you built without redoing the work.

🛠 How to use it

1. Under Compress, press Choose files and multi-select, or drop files on the dashed box. The count and total size appear below the list.
2. Drag the level slider to a setting and type the name you want for the archive.
3. Press Compress. The right-hand panel shows the before and after sizes; then press Download ZIP.
4. To unpack, switch to Extract and choose a ZIP. Every entry appears in the list.
5. Click the dot beside an entry to select it and see a preview on the right. Extract selected takes just that one; Extract all takes everything.

⚠️ Before you rely on it

• No encryption. Archives come out as ordinary password-free ZIPs. Anything confidential needs a real archiver with encryption before you send it.
• Browser memory is the ceiling. The archive and every file are read fully into memory, so hundreds of megabytes may fail on a modest machine. Split into batches.
• Compression depends on the content. Photos, video and audio are already compressed and will barely shrink, if at all. Text, logs and source code shrink the most.
• Extracting all can be blocked. Browsers usually ask before allowing a burst of downloads, so with many files prefer extracting one at a time.
• A damaged archive says so. Parsing failures produce a clear message rather than a pile of empty or garbled files - check the download completed.