Here’s a cool way to safely store away pictures, files and anything else you need to keep safe. BlueBox Live is a product that lets you archive and compress your sensitive files on your hard disk, then send them securely to friends and family. If you have a digital camera you need this product. They claim to be able to compress images and text files to save loads of space. 
You could probably achieve the same thing using a password protected ZIP file, however that would involve lots of messing around and according to the comparison page, BlueBox Live can compress them to a fraction of the size that WinZip or StuffIt compresses them to. BlueBox Live also lets you drag and drop files into the archive and lets you send them around. The viewer can also be downloaded free.