Compress ARW Files

ARW is Sony's proprietary RAW image format, produced by Alpha mirrorless and A-mount DSLT cameras. It stores the sensor data almost exactly as captured — minimal in-camera processing, full tonal and color range — which is what gives editors so much latitude to recover highlights, shadows, and white balance later. That same unprocessed nature is why a single ARW frame typically runs 25-60 MB, even straight out of the camera before any editing.

A handful of ARW photos rarely feels like a problem, but real shoots don't stay small for long:

• Burst mode can produce dozens of full-size RAW frames in a few seconds
• A single day of shooting easily generates 10-30 GB of ARW files
• Memory cards and laptop drives fill up mid-trip or mid-shoot
• Cloud backup of a full RAW library becomes slow and expensive
• Sharing a handful of ARW files by email or messaging is often impossible outright

MiCompress decodes your ARW using dcraw, reading Sony's raw sensor data with the camera's recorded white balance, then hands the decoded image to our image engine to produce a high-quality JPEG. This isn't a lossless repack of the RAW data — it's a controlled conversion that keeps the shot fully usable for viewing, printing, and sharing while cutting the file down to a fraction of the original size. If you need to keep editing with full RAW latitude, hold on to the original ARW; use the compressed output when you just need a smaller, shareable version of the photo.

Professional workflows almost always split these two needs apart: the ARW stays as your archival master with full editing latitude, while a compressed JPG export is what actually gets sent to clients, posted online, or attached to an email. Keeping that split means you never lose editing flexibility, and you never have to explain why a 40 MB RAW file bounced back from someone's inbox.

Because the output is a re-encoded JPEG rather than a same-format ARW, the size drop is dramatic — typically 90% or more smaller than the original RAW file, depending on resolution and scene detail. That makes it easy to hand off a batch of shots for review, upload a portfolio, or archive proofs without keeping every frame at full RAW size.