Extracting your .zip archive

Now that you have your images downloaded in a .zip file, how do you open them?

Windows Vista and higher (7, 8, 10) come with a built-in utility for extracting the files (Mac users, skip ahead).

You can either double click the .zip file which will open in a file browser window (Windows Explorer).  From there, click the “Extract All Files” option from the toolbar and follow the extraction wizard.

Or, you can RIGHT click the .zip file and select “extract all files” and follow the extraction wizard.

By default, the extracted folder location will be in the same folder (Desktop, My Documents, etc.) as the .zip file and will have the same name.

For example, we downloaded “familyphotos-photo-download-part1of1.zip” to our Desktop.  After running through the extraction wizard, we now have a folder on our Desktop with the same name of “familyphotos-photo-download-part1of1”.  You’ll also notice two different icons.  One icon will be a folder with a zipper on it (.zip file) and the other will just be a normal folder.  The icon of the normal folder will be the extracted folder (where you will find your individual image files).

For Mac OS X computers, double click the .zip file and the file will automatically extract to a folder in the same location, just like Windows.  For newer versions of Mac OS X, the .zip is automatically extracted for you and the name of the folder will be “highlights”.

Hope that helps! Be sure to save your images for safe keeping in order to easily access them for sharing online or ordering wall art for your home. Please feel free to contact me with any further questions!