By Your camera’s RAW files are swelling your hard drives, cloud storage costs are climbing every month, and file transfers still crawl at frustrating speeds. Zstandard—often shortened to Zstd—is a compression algorithm that’s quietly revolutionizing how photographers store and move their massive image libraries, offering dramatically better compression ratios than the industry-standard ZIP format while maintaining blazing-fast decompression speeds.
Think of Zstandard as the modern alternative to compression methods that haven’t meaningfully evolved in decades. Developed by Facebook (now Meta) engineer Yann Collet …
