Zip & Unzip Files

How to use

1. Mode opens on Zip, or on whichever side you used last. Press Unzip to open an archive somebody sent you.
2. Building: drag files or a folder onto the Files box, or press Browse and take Choose files or Choose a folder. Every pick adds to the list, and Remove on a row takes one back out.
3. Fill in Password only if the archive needs one, then press Download .zip. The panel shows how many files went in, the archive's size and the saving.
4. Opening: drop the .zip onto the Archive box. Every entry is listed with its path and size; the download button on a row pulls out that file, and Download all saves the lot one file at a time. If it is password-protected, type the password and press Unlock first.

How this works

Two jobs, one page, split by the Mode chips at the top. Zip takes a pile of files and hands you a single .zip. Unzip takes a .zip somebody sent you and lists what is inside it, one row per file with its path and size, so you can pull out a single one or the whole lot. The page remembers which side you used last.

On the Zip side, drop files or a whole folder onto the Files box, or press Browse for either. A dropped folder brings its whole tree, each file recorded under its folder-relative path, so unpacking gives you the folder back rather than a flat heap. Every pick adds to the list instead of replacing it, which is how you combine loose files with a folder, and Remove on a row drops anything you added by mistake. The archive is named after the folder when the first entry sits in one, and after the first file otherwise, so a dropped invoices folder comes out as invoices.zip.

The Password field is optional. Leave it empty and you get a plain .zip that every operating system opens. Type one and the archive is written with AES-256 instead, which 7-Zip, WinRAR, Keka and the macOS Unarchiver all open. Windows Explorer does not: it shows the file names and then refuses to extract them, so tell your recipient what to open it with before you send it.

Both paths deflate on the way in, so text and source code shrink, and once the archive is written the panel shows its size against what went in. Photos, video and anything already compressed barely move. Nothing is re-encoded either way, and what you extract is byte for byte what you put in.

The Unzip side reads the archive's directory, lists every file with its full path and size, and totals them before a byte is decompressed. The download button on a row saves that one file. Download all saves each file separately, which is why the browser puts up its multiple-downloads prompt the first time. A password-protected archive still lists its names straight away, because a zip keeps those in the clear; the files themselves wait for Unlock.

What the compression actually does

I ran a 60,000-byte text file through both paths: one twelve-byte phrase repeated 5,000 times, which is about as friendly as data ever gets. With the Password field empty the archive came back at 266 bytes. With a password typed in, the same file came back at 422 bytes, still tiny and now unreadable without it.

That is deflate at work on data built to flatter it. Real prose or source code shrinks a few times over, not two hundred, and a folder of JPEGs or MP4s will hardly shrink at all because those are already compressed.

Good to know

What this tool leaves out

• It reads standard .zip and nothing else. RAR and 7z won't open, and neither will an archive whose directory is damaged.

What a browser cannot do

• A browser download can't create folders, so Download all saves every file flat into your downloads folder under its own name. Two files with the same name in different folders land as duplicates.