dvd BURNING CAPACITY

If they are jpgs, load them into an editor (e.g. GIMP, PhotoShop, etc.) or a program like IrfanView and choose a lower quality setting (i.e. greater compression).

If they are pngs, make sure you chose the highest compression level when you saved them.

Celso Zannin said:

Thanks for suggesting I can get more if I increase the compression. The jpgs need to be full quality. I can easily reduce the number I put on the DVD but my question is "Why should I, when the files only total 4.1gb and there is 4.38gb free space on the blank DVD.

Sorry my bad.
I misread your post.

Some images actually compress better as png files, than jpg files.
I don't know an easy way to tell which ones though.

Here's an example.

The JPG file at 100% (left, 20.8 KB) is ~2.5x larger than the PNG (right, 8.3 KB).
PNG files are also lossless.

These might be silly questions:

1. Are those sizes reported by the same tool (e.g. Windows Explorer)?
2. What program are you using to try to burn the DVD?
3. Does the burning tool "think" that there are other files still queued for burning?
4. Have you checked that there aren't any "Hidden" or "System" files in your source directory?

This is most probably not going to help you at all but as it IMO is important to understand the difference between the actual size of a file and the space it needs on various storage media, I thought it would be useful to post this here.

All storage media consist of so called allocation units or clusters. Default cluster size on NTFS hard disks up to 16 TB is 4 KB. When formatting an NTFS hard disk partition, this cluster size will be used if the user does not manually change it:

One cluster can only store data from one file. If the cluster is not completely used by a file, the remaining free space is marked as reserved and used by the system and will not be available to other files. Take for example the two screenshots Lehnerus posted here above, the PNG file 8.3 KB and the JPG file 20.8 KB. When stored to an NTFS disk using default cluster size it would look something like this:

JPG 20.8 KB:

PNG 8.3 KB

One box represents one 4 KB cluster, yellow highlight the actual space the file needs, red the "wasted" space (not used but reserved) and empty box a free cluster after the file ready to store first 4 KB of the next file. If you look closer for instance the latter (PNG file) and check its properties you'll notice that although the file itself only needs a bit over 2 clusters, the system gives it full 3 clusters:

The difference, amount of empty but not available disk space used by this file is almost 50% more than the actual file size. Multiply this with thousands of files and you'll see why your HDD is filling up faster than it should. Let's say we had to save 1000 images exactly the same size as this example PNG file on an NTFS disk. We would need 12,288,000 bytes = 11.7 MB disk space although the actual combined file size would only be 8,542,000 bytes = 8.15 MB. We lost 3,746,000 bytes = 3.58 MB of our storage space.


In your case though this should only matter if you are not using default cluster size on HDD but have instead formatted HDD with smaller clusters. A usual CD and DVD cluster size is 2 KB so theoretically you images with total size of 4.14 GB should take a bit less than that on DVD as the extra reserved space for each file, the last not totally filled cluster could be at max a bit under 2 KB compared to that of 4 KB on HDD.

In any case I hope this have given you some useful information.

Kari

You could try archiving the photos (e.g. zipping them).

You probably won't save much space due to compression (the images are already compressed).
In fact, you could set the archive tool for zero compression.

Archiving should convert the hundreds(?) of photos into a single large file, which may save space overall (as per Kari's explanation above).

I selected 3 text files and created a zero compression archive (ignore the weird file type for that archive).
As you can see in the picture, it saved a significant amount of disc space.
The archive uses 1/3 of the disc space, despite it being set to zero compression.

Click on the picture for the animation

Unfortunately, I don't think you'll be able to scavenge enough space even if you set your archive tool to maximum compression.