For many digi scrappers, one of the dreaded parts of downloading new goodies is unzipping them. How many times have you downloaded some new supplies, but not unzipped them right away, only to come back later and find out the file was corrupt? One of my (Steph’s) favorite discoveries after I started digi scrapping was ‘Unzip Them All’. I didn’t find it on purpose, because I didn’t know there was a tool like this out there to even know to look for it. I was in a forum and saw someone mention that they could unzip multiple files at one time with this utility. I thought, “WHAT!? A way to unzip a lot of zips at one time? I must try this!” I quickly downloaded and installed ‘Unzip Them All’ and have loved having it especially when I have a lot of zips (those $1 sales hee hee).

I have been using ‘Unzip Them All’ for three or four years now, but have since found out that there are many depcompression utilities out there, that have a lot of really great features. After reading Heidi’s very thorough review of ‘Extract Now‘, I have thought about trying it out, but I still stay with ‘Unzip Them All’, not because I think it is the best out there, but because it’s already on my machine and it works for me. The interface on ‘Unzip Them All’ is pretty basic, but it does everything I want. I like that I can tell it to keep the zips or delete them after they have been unzipped (I usually keep them until I make sure there were no corrupt files). It also can handle A LOT of zips at one time without slowing down my system or crashing it. If you currently are not using a decompression tool, you might want to take the time to read Heidi’s review or these great reveiws I found here on several different free tools or these reveiws on both free and pay utilities.

Now, I have a system in place after I download, I unzip the files and then delete the zips (once I am sure that everything uzipped okay). It makes it easier to know if a file is corrupt right then while I am still downloading. It is also really nice to be able to use my goodies right when I want to and not have to wait for them to unzip first. The very best part of using a decompression utility though is only waiting a few seconds for ALL of my zips to unzip!!