GC disc image manipulation questions

[radorn]

Hello

For a number of reasons I'm interested in doing some, I think, unusual thing to a number of GC images I have, mainly in order to reduce storage requirements.
Usually I'm all for 1:1 copies, but in my current circumstances it may not be a priority, and I'd rather have a more streamlined "collection" or even do away with it, but before that, I'd like to check my options with the experts. So, please, help me out here.

Recently I've found some gc images distributed not as images, but as extracted file folders: that is, the files are extracted from the image and compressed in an archive instead of the whole image, and I'd say it seems to compress better than even garbage wiped images, particularly when you store multi disc games in the same archive, as it seems neither 7z or RAR are particularly good at finding scattered redundancy across multiple big file containers (like disc images are), normally yielding marginal benefits when you do that, even if you'd expect there to be considerable amounts of redundant data.

I'd like info on what are the best tools for garbage wiping (and the possible problems garbage wiping might cause, like triping copy protection mechanisms. any known cases of that?), file extraction and image rebuilding, and whatever else I might need, like streaming file alignment (I've seen this 32K thing, but I'm not really sure what it really is about).

I realize this might be a broad request, so thanks in advance for any leads or explanations.

[iamdablasta]

Personally I use gcit (gamecube iso tool 1.01 build 5) to trim iso's and no trimmed iso has so far not worked (out of 20ish games).