I've compacted successfully. I failed to find the 'save' option. Are you referring to making a backup? I did that as well, and at that point, I received a prompt notifying me I must manually back up my images. ...no kidding!!! that's what i'm trying to do!! sheesh talk about a catch 22 :-/
If you are referring to exporting the data base to HTML, I've already done that too. which of course creates a 'covers' folder with the images contained with in.
I was under the impression the program would save the images without importing to HTML.

I have all my images saved as "<album name>.jpg" and of course the HTML saves them, but saves them with numeric extensions. I would hate to manually change them back to names :'(
I guess my question should be: "how does one save the images to file, with out haveing to export to HTML"?
Thank You for your patients and understanding