Windows Vista Vista and zipping photos folders

Okay. So I have an item for sale and a guy wants me to send him photos of it.

We have finally gotten a day that is (1) warm, (2) sunny, and (3) when I am not sick from being exposed to mold six weeks ago... so I go out and take photos.

Actually, 16 of them, and according to Windows they are 1 megabyte each.

My MS Office Outlook client is having fits sending them. So I thought that compressing the folder into something smaller might help.

I right clicked and sent the folder to a compressed folder, and it now a copy shows up with widdly biddy zipper thingy.

But the properties on the zipped folder indicate "23 megabytes. "

Say what? I started out with 16 one MB photos, and now it says, "23 megabytes? "

What is up with that? I thought zipping (compressing) the folder of photos would make it smaller.

Maybe I need to use something besides the tools in Vista.

Anyway, all insight will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Rick