How To Zip and Unzip Files On Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can compress and decompress files on your Mac.

MacMost is brought to you thanks to an incredible group of supporters. Join us and get exclusive content at MacMost.com/patreon.

So it's very easy to compress a file, group of files, or even folders using a simple command in the Finder on your Mac. This is also known as zipping the files because the zip format is mostly used for compression. Just as easily you can decompress any zip file that you receive by email or download.

So compressing a file is pretty easy. All I need to do is use the Context menu which I can get to with a two finger click on my trackpad or by Control clicking on a file and then I get the option to Compress. So look for the option Compress and the name of the file. If I select that I will get the same file there but with dot zip after it. You can see it has compressed it some. So 187 KB to 137 KB. 

Now if I want to do that with multiple files I can select one file and then I'll select another one holding down the Command key for a multiple selection. Then Control click either one of those and it will say Compress 2 items or however many items there are selected. Then you get something named Archive.zip. I can quickly hit the Return key and rename it whatever I want. Then I get both of those saved to a single file. 

I can do the same thing with a folder. I can Control click it and Compress and I get the entire folder compressed. I can even select multiple folders and then it will compress both those items. I can select a whole arrangement of different things and compress them all into one archive.

Now to decompress it's even easier than that. Just double click on the file like you're going to open it in something. What happens is will actually open it in something called the Archive Utility. Watch you'll see it quickly appear here in place of the Finder as the app that's running. Then what you get is a folder that's the name of the zip file. So actually if I were to name it something different you can see it's just going to take the name from here and create a folder with that. If I look in it I'll see all the contents there all decompressed and ready to use as normal.

There are three main reasons you may want to compress something. One is to be able to send it somebody without any complications. Sometimes email apps or even downloading from a web browser can cause complications with certain type of file. An image my display rather than download for instance. Also sometimes you may want to send multiple files to somebody and you see it's easy to zip up multiple files where sending an email with a whole bunch of files as attachments may be confusing for the receiver. 

Of course the third reason is that it compresses it so it can make things smaller. Now compressions are going to vary. Images are already pretty compressed. jpeg is a compressed image format so you may find that zipping up a jpeg saves almost no space. But compressing word processing documents and some other types of documents may actually reduce the file size by quite a bit.

Now you saw there was that Archive Utility. That's actually kind of a useful thing because you can run that on its own and you get some more options. So I'm going to run the Archive Utility by searching for it in Spotlight. So Command Space and I can find it there pretty easily. Now the Archive Utility doesn't have anything going on by itself right away. You can go to File, Create Archive, then select Files and hit Archive. You can also go to Expand Archive and you can select a zip file to expand.

But the interesting thing about using Archive Utility for this is there are a set of Preferences. As you can see you've got more options than the simple double click to decompress or Control click to compress a file. You can set a location for expanded files to go into instead of in the same location as the zip file. You can automatically have the file moved to the trash or automatically deleted or even to a special folder after expansion. Also if there are zip files inside of zip files whether the expansion kind of continues till everything is unzipped.

When creating an archive you can also set a location for that. You can choose from three formats. The first one is a special format that you probably shouldn't use unless you're just going to another Mac. It's just a compressed archive. You can also do a version of that that is noncompressed. So this might save some time if it's a huge set of files and you're not going to get much compression out of it, it will take some time to compress it and time to decompress it. So using a regular archive saves that time. The third option is the option you get by default in the Finder which is create a zip archive which can be universally open by all sorts of different operating systems and devices. 

You can determine what happens with the original files after they are archived. So you probably want to have them left alone but you have them automatically moved to the trash or deleted.

So this is useful if you use the Archive Utility to actually archive files. After all that is the name of the utility, Archive Utility. So zipping files up isn't just for sending to others. You may want to actually compress your files into a single file just to save space on your hard drive or to organize things better. For instance at the end of a semester at school or at the end of a big project at work you may want to take all the files from it and compress it into a single archive that takes up less space on your hard drive and creates less clutter.