I made a comment on the page for yesterday's free offering (Christmas Images). Last night, it was listed as the 2nd comment. I just looked today and there are now 10 comments (as opposed to 2 at midnight last night) but mine is not there!
Most of the comments were similar to mine -- LONG, and SLOOOOW downloading. It took me from about 1 PM to Midnight to do all 10 and that was with re-dos on 2 of them. Why were they left but mine removed?
I noticed they could still be downloaded. I tested, just to be sure. Although this is advertised as Christmas pictures, it should be noted that some of them CLEARLY say "Happy Easter" in the middle of them.
Also, if you want to re-zip them later (after giving the password once, to avoid it again), you will have to have a bulk re-namer. Microsoft is very picky about what goes into a zip and if it won't take a variation of a single quote then it definitely won't take the Chinese characters. You need a bulk process because it's awful time-consuming to rename over 4500 files manually!
One other note - don't try converting them to jpg, or at least not with irfanview. The result is much smaller but the checkerboard background goes away and lots of garbage appears around the edges of the image. Best bet - keep it at png.
mikiem2
Moderator
FWIW, that checkered background is a transparent alpha layer. The .png format, along with .tif & many proprietary formats will allow an alpha layer, but as you found out, .jpg will not. The reason for the transparent background is so that if/when you paste an object onto another image, say a photo for a greeting card, you don't get a colored rectangle around the object. That background is created by first selecting the object, and the provider likely using a lower quality method of selecting the objects in those images is the reason if there are fuzzy edges. Ideally they should be feathered -- think of the way the edges fade away when you use a can of spray paint.
For batch renaming, PowerToys includes a renamer, along with several other tools & gadgets you might like.
learn.microsoft[.]com/en-us/windows/powertoys/
I use Bulk Rename Utility that I found a few years ago when the old renamer I was using suddenly stopped working. It wouldn't even load! There weren't any updates around that time, it just worked one day and didn't the next.
This one is far more powerful than I need but I've gotten comfortable with the 3 or 4 fields that I need to use.
My favorite zipper is 7z. That had no problems with the Chinese characters. So I did not need a renamer, and 7z resulted in a slightly smaller compressed file than the original.
The pictures are 4096 by 4096 and use 32 bits for color. For me, the pictures looked as haven been AI-generated. Not really my taste. When I reduced the number of colors to 256 (8 bits) with FS Capture, the file size went down from nearly 20 MB to less than 4 MB. My 80+ year old eyes could not really see a difference.
Better to keep the lossless .png format.
FS Capture does not show the checkered background.
I use 7-zip to unzip and I have used it to zip occasionally. I don't like to use it to zip for compatibility reasons.
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