1000 Gigapixel Images

[Kaskuser Kiss]

Agigapixel image is a digital image bitmap composed of one billion (109) pixels (picture elements), 1000 times the information captured by a 1 megapixel digital camera. A square image of 31,623 pixels in width and height is one gigapixel. Current technology for creating such very high-resolution images usually involves either making digital image mosaics of many high-resolution digital photographs or using a film negative as large as 12" 9" (30 cm 23 cm) up to 18" 9" (46 cm 23 cm), which is then scanned with a high-end large-format film scanner with at least 3000 dpi resolution. Only a few cameras are capable of creating a gigapixel image in a single sweep of a scene, such as the Pan-STARRS PS1 and the Gigapxl Camera.[1][2]

A terapixel image is an image composed of one trillion (1012) pixels. Though currently rare, there have been a few instances such as the Microsoft Research Terapixel project for use on the Fulldome projection system,[3] a composite of medical images by Aperio,[4][5] and Google Earth's Landsat images viewable as a time-lapse are collectively considered over one terapixel.[6]

The panorama was shot by Jeffrey Martin, Holger Schulze and Tom Mills and then subsequently created by Jeffrey Martin. It is comprised of 48,640 individual images shot over a period of three days and processed over a period of three months using a powerful Fujitsu Celsius R920 workstation provided by Fujitsu Technology Solutions Europe.

The pictures were taken using Canon EOS 7D cameras with EF 400mm f/2.8 IS II USM lenses and Extender EF 2x III teleconverters driven by special Rodeon VR Head ST robotic panorama heads from the Clauss company in Germany.

We will shoot and deliver a specially commissioned spherical gigapixel photo for you to use in connection with your marketing campaign, tourism promotion, etc. It's a great way to generate publicity. Read more here.

I spend a lot of time experimenting and working with pretty high MP images, as I have been researching approaches and algorithms for extreme digital upscaling of RAW images. I regularly take my original 12.2mp images to multi-foot dimensions comprised of anywhere from 220 megapixels (55x44" print @ 300PPI) to 2.4 gigapixels (96x72" print @ 600PPI.) I use photoshop for viewing my work.

In my experience, with a system that has 12 gigs of DDR3 triple channel memory, Photoshop is able to handle images several hundred megapixels in size pretty darn well. When I get up to around 600-700mp or so, things start to slow down (this is when all my physical memory is consumed, and swap usage starts.) Working with gigapixel images ultimately means that you just start churning on disk more. I recently upgraded to an SSD drive for my primary/swap drive, and the performance of working with 800mp or larger images has improved considerably, however it is best if you aren't running other apps when working with gigapixel images. It should also be noted that any processing you apply to a gigapixel image is going to take some time, regardless of what that processing is...and even with a very fast system.

Microsoft has Deep Zoom (a.k.a.Seadragon, a.k.a Zoom.it, a.k.a.MultiScaleImage), which is part of Silverlight. The images need to be pre-processed by the Deep Zoom Tools or a similar tool, which breaks the image into tiles at many different resolutions, starting at a 1px x 1px version all the way up to the full version. The pre-processing will require some time, particularly for a 100+ MP image, but once it's been done, it can be very easily viewed using even a low-end system.

Microsoft didn't invent this type of image viewing, but their implementation is pretty good. The control only uses image information that's relevant to the current view, and doesn't bother to download or hold in memory every single pixel.

I don't know of any single-purpose Deep Zoom viewer program, but there could be one that exists. A Silverlight app can run out-of-browser as a standalone application (as of version 3). If you have any .NET programming experience, this would be trivial to write.

Anyway, I've read various threads about scratch issues going back years and nobody seems to have an aswer to this specific big file type problem. You can purge, or change drives for scratch, turn one off, another on, in preferences, reset preferences, but nothing works.

What is limiting PS from keeping on writing scratch files and filling gobs more of hard drive space? Is there some sort of hard limit in the code that says "Nope, that's all you get for scratch! We don't care that you have ten other hard drives begging to be used."

I attached the screen shot. Pixel dimensions are often at or over 250000 X 25000 px. And also often with numerous layers. History states I have set to 1000 and have never hit my limit to the best of my memory. I have 448 GB of memory with Photoshop's allowance set to max at 365K GB. 49 Xeon Gold cores, and a RTX 3090 with 24 GB of video memory.

I realize I do very uncommon work. There's other big frusterations/bugs, etc., with PS when working on super large images, but I've gotten used to those problems and they don't cause me to lose my work. But this scratch disk full when there's ample room drives me crazy. I try to remember to save often, but when you are saving files as big as mine, it takes forever and its hard on your drives. Thus I don't use autosave. Then, sometimes you just plain forget to save. Regardless, once you hit that scratch disk mystery hard limit, all work of any type and saving comes to a screeching halt and PS has to be shut down to recoup, with all extra drive space ignored.

My guess is nobody will have any solutions and Adobe won't fix the issue since us gigapixel guys are one in a million. But, figured I would post and give it a shot. I've tried to figure it out for years now, but to no avail.

so I assume you disagree. I've seen many people who disagreed, but usually Photoshop is right. There's a simple test you need to do, because it changes completely the direction to go. When you get the message saying scratch disks are full, LEAVE THE MESSAGE ON SCREEN. While the message is on screen, leave Photoshop frozen and go back to Windows and check the free space on your five scratch disks. Maybe a screen shot from File Explorer would be interesting. (Clearly if you reply to the message Photoshop may release some space, that's why the message needs to still be on screen).

Thanks for your reply. Yes, the drives are not full whether the message is there or not, including the primary. I've checked them many times. Like I said earlier, it is as if there's a hard limit in PS as to how much scratch you can have regardless of drive space. Or, some other alien issue I have yet to figure out after years of this.

I have that available but it doesn't mean I'm using that many. It's not relevant. I can work for hours until suddenly I can't. When it can take up to twenty minutes just to load my files, I would like to not deal with this issue. And, as I mentioned, even with purge or deleting history manually, once I hit the scratch disk full error, there's nothing I can do to undo PS thinking the disks are full. That is the core issue here.

Like I said earlier, I can turn off the primary scratch drive (which is not full itself) and put another one with even more substantial space in its place, but PS refuses to see I've done that. It's not a history states issue to me. It's a bug, or a limitation in the code.

Let's consider if I loaded up several of my massive files and did no editing at all. Eventually I will hit the scratch drives full error, and even though there is plenty of space, I can not save any of them, if say I needed to. PS is basically in a frozen state at this point where I can't do any further work.

My files sizes are often 100-200GB in size, so it's a unique problem I have. I wasn't expecting solutions, rather just hoping by chance somebody that does odd projects like me may have found a work around. Thanks for your time on it.

If you have scratch on your system drive, the scratch files will be in the Windows TEMP directory, in your user account. If that's where it fills up, Windows is probably protecting the system from a terminal freeze by halting activity well before the disk is actually full. A system drive that is actually full, turns your computer into an expensive doorstop.

Bottom line: with those file sizes and unlimited history states, I'm not at all surprised that your scratch disk(s) fill up very quickly. For what you're describing, I would set up at least 5TB of dedicated drives just to deal with scratch. Those are enormous amounts of data, and it all has to go somewhere.

I've attached the image showing the scratch disk error message, with my N drive, not full, and with several other drives not being rolled over to. There are no PS temp files on any other drive. You will note I was able to get the error after a half a dozen history states. And, I don't use the C drive for scratch.

So, yes, PS "thinks" the disks are full, and nothing I can do, that I am aware of, will change that save shutting down. As stated before, purging does not work. Before and after purging all, drive space on N remained exactly the same. Manual deleting of history does not work, switching drives in preferences, or resetting preferences, and so on. PS refuses to release the saved scratch files at this point. Does anyone with experience with extremely large file editing know a work around? Thank you.

Camera manufacturers are keenly aware of how much photographers love their gear and in particular, how much they love extreme gear. As lenses continue to push below f/1 apertures and ISO capabilities skyrocket towards seven-digit figures, is the next major specs war going to be making the first mainstream consumer camera that can shoot gigapixel (1,000 megapixel) photos?

I always think of the famous "the numbers all go to 11" scene from "Spinal Tap" when I think about photography gear. The truth is that a lot of us (from doe-eyed neophytes to seasoned professionals) love the nerdy side of gear. We love seeing the new extremes that manufacturers can push cameras and lenses to, and we are more than willing to pay for the privilege of using the latest and greatest a lot of the time.

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