A project can be compressed into an archive. The standard GroIMP extension is .gsz, but it is a simple archive. Any .zip, 7z, or other archive format would work (as long as you rename the extension .gsz).

The archive contains all the content of the project. It can be viewed, modified, or extracted with any archive tools on you computer.

Note that:

• GroIMP requires the archive extension to be .gsz.
• The archive needs to follow the same compression order as a java package. Thus, if you want to compress the project manually you need to include first the META-INF directory.

For instance to compress a project in the current folder you can use the command:

zip -r myProject.gsz META-INF/ *

While working with an open project, there is one difference between projects in GS/GSZ file format: If you modify and save files (e.g., text files) contained in a GS project, they will be written to your file system immediately because the GS file format consists of a set of files in your file system. However, for a GSZ project, these files are written to an internal storage: Your modifications are persistently saved only when the whole project is saved.