It perhaps goes without saying that the digital photography revolution has brought us a booming demand for storage space. But there's another alternative to adding ever-larger hard drives to your system, and that's to employ image-centric compression software, such as BluBox 4.

The box offers grandiose claims about being able to knock your image sizes down by anything up to 90-95 percent. Given that some image formats - such as JPEG - contain compression anyway, we were somewhat sceptical as to how successful BluBox could be, but nonetheless were happy to put it to the test.

One hour later, that munching sound you hear is our words being eaten. Because, while we didn't quite manage that 90+ percent compression, BluBox did manage to bring down the size of our test photos dramatically, leaving us not only eschewing the need for worry about sending individual photos, but also opening up the possibility of sending image albums over e-mail.

The program works its magic through a simple and straightforward interface that seems in keeping with the BluBox ethos: it's here to do a job and so it just gets on with it. From the pop-up menu we chose to create a new archive, the program then asked us to name it and choose where we wanted to save it.

It's saved with a .blu file extension (it supports zip files too, but no other forms of compression). Then, by default, a form appears inviting you to enter and re-enter a password; it's not compulsory, nor is there any on-screen recommendation one way or another. It's good practice to do so, though. So we did.

Once done, you then get transported to a simple drag-and-drop window, where you move your images to get them added to the archive. We dug out a collection of 148 JPEG and PNG images, amounting to 212MB, to test out the new archive, and it did take a couple of minutes for the software to process them all.

BluBox, by default, got this file size down to 137MB. So we tried again, but knocked the compression up to maximum, and this time it got the file size down to a staggering 23MB, which is 89 percent compression. What's more, it did this without any notable impact on the quality of the images themselves. And while we'd not recommend using top level compression on pictures for any kind of professional purpose, there's little doubting that BluBox has, to our knowledge, an unrivalled ability to shrink the file sizes of images.

For the sake of comparison we performed the same function using WinRAR's maximum compression, and that dropped the 212MB down to 208MB.

Also featuring some minor cropping and resizing options, BluBox nonetheless is likely to be used for one task only, to bring down the size of image files. Fortunately it's a task it's quite brilliant at, and given the modest price tag for the software, it's a strong purchase for the enthusiastic amateur digital photographer.

Boasting quite spectacular compression rates, BluBox 4 is a terrific way to bring down your image file sizes and save a bit of storage space too.