FotoFox: compress photos and videos on mobile devices

Photo and videos that you capture on your mobile devices can take up a sizable chunk of storage space. If you are an avid photographer for instance, you may have run into storage issues previously on your device.

This is usually resolved temporarily by moving photos to local or remote servers before deleting them on the device you took them on.

FotoFox is a new application for Android and iOS devices that offers another approach. Instead of saving the full version of photos or videos on the device, it saves a highly compressed versions on it instead on it which saves storage space.

To make sure that you still got access to the full version should you need to, it is uploading all media files to cloud servers so that you get access to the files whenever the need arises.

According to the company, photos taken with FotoFox take up only 10% of the space of original photos. This may vary though from device to device as it depends on several factors.

The app reduced 1.5 Megabyte large photos taken on an Android 5 device to 0.1 Megabyte each and 2.6 Megabyte photos to 0.3 Megabyte during tests.

FotoFox supports video as well. If you use it to capture video it will use compression to reduce the size of the video that is stored on the device. It reduced the size of videos to less than 20% of the original size during tests.

All files get uploaded to the cloud automatically when you use the app to take photos or capture videos. The manage page enables you to check the savings for each individual media file and the total savings up to that point in time.

Download options are provided for each file to save it to the local device. One thing that is missing is an option to transfer the photos or videos to a computer instead for storage.

Cloud storage is unlimited according to the application's description. I'm always skeptic when claims like these are made as it is usually too good to be true. It remains to be seen how the company plans to finance the storage, operations and development  as it is not charging for the app, storage or extra features right now.

You may use the app to compress and upload photos and videos that are already stored on the device. This has the potential to save lots of space depending on how many photos and videos are stored on it at that time.

The compressed photos and videos look fine on small screen devices.

Verdict

FotoFox offers an interesting service that should appeal to mobile users who take photos or videos regularly provided that you don't need access to full versions on the device at all times.

I recommend to make regular backups of photos and videos uploaded to the service though until the company reveals how it plans to keep it sustainable.