Compress Multiple .zip Files w/ Archive Utility

Okay, so this morning I had 1730 directories that I needed compressed in .zip format individually. I looked all over the help forums and saw a few solutions offered up using Automator and even some command line stuff w/ terminal that was way more intense than what I was looking to do. I reached out to one of my “Mac Power User” buddies on Skype to see if he could help me out and he said that he couldn’t think of a way so I was pretty discouraged at this point. I turned to stack overflow, found a few others looking for the same thing I wanted.

All I needed to do is compress 1730 directories into their own individual .zip directories. Not one archive.zip file w/ everything inside of that, but 1730 separate .zip files. Like I said, I looked all around for this and finally stumbled upon a solution this morning that works like a charm using the Archive Utility…

The Solution: Compressing Multiple Directories into Multiple .zip Directories:

The Archive Utility is a somewhat hidden app to the casual Mac user, it can be located however here: System/Library/CoreServices/Archive Utility.app. I think in past versions of OSX it was called BOM archiver or something like that.  Okay, so this is the app that OSX uses to compress files…

1. Open the Archive Utility.app
2. Select the option to keep it in your dock.
3. Change it’s preferences to output to .zip rather than compressed.
4. Now, open the directory that has all of the subfolders that you want to compress individually and select them all and drag them to the Archive Utility.app icon in your dock and it will go to work archiving all of your subdirect
   ories for you.

Admittedly it is still in the process of compressing all 1730 directories but it sure beats the alternative of manually zipping each directory one at a time. Again, this is probably extremely elementary to a lot of you that have been in the Mac environment for a while, but I’m all over this like ants on a snow cone right now!!