If there is a way to do this? Or another way to get the same result?

The best thing I know to do is to work in small chunks whenever possible. You can open up .xcf files withIn another .xcf, using "open as layers." Perhaps for the final layout you can bear though it?

The open as layers feature will keep the layers of the smaller .xcf files accessible from your final image. However, I think it will consume less memory if you export a "flattened" image - meaning you won't have access to the layers.

Either way you do it, get yourself a nice computer. ;)

Best of luck,

-Stefan Maerz

Hi Chris,

On 15 May 11 01:01 Christoph Schwitter said:

If there is a way to do this? Or another way to get the same result?

Scaling down will always mean that, at some point, you will need to up-scale it with the consequent loss of detail.

Stitching several parts together will lead to a slow final process, which may coke if you have insufficient RAM.

Probably the only way to do it well is to ensure you have enough RAM installed, and that will mean an eeeennnooormous amount. The image size, that the GIMP works with is many times bigger than a JPEG file that you load. Check the status line on the GIMP. A typical 2.2Mb file from my 9Mpx camera expands to around 80Mb once uncompressed for editing within the GIMP.

Greg Chapman
http://www.gregtutor.plus.com
Helping new users of KompoZer and The GIMP

On Sunday, May 15, 2011 03:56:15 am Greg Chapman wrote:

Hi Chris,

On 15 May 11 01:01 Christoph Schwitter

said:

If there is a way to do this? Or another way to get the same result?

Scaling down will always mean that, at some point, you will need to up-scale it with the consequent loss of detail.

Stitching several parts together will lead to a slow final process, which may coke if you have insufficient RAM.

Probably the only way to do it well is to ensure you have enough RAM installed, and that will mean an eeeennnooormous amount. The image size, that the GIMP works with is many times bigger than a JPEG file that you load. Check the status line on the GIMP. A typical 2.2Mb file from my 9Mpx camera expands to around 80Mb once uncompressed for editing within the GIMP.

Greg Chapman

If the OP is working in Linux then perhaps the swap space would take up the slack. Also, it may be possible to produce all the pieces of the collage in Gimp and then stitch them together in another program, such as Scribus or ImageMagick. ImageMagick has a Montage program that might be useful. Any program that lacks the memory overhead of Gimp could be used.

I intend to create a huge collage (22000 x 24000 pixels = 4.6 GB file size). Working on the image becomes impracticably slow.

Is there a way to do the whole collage in small (10% of the size / resolution), arrange layers, masks etc. in the small version until it fits, and then convert it to the full size version? I guess that would mean first changing the image resolution, and then have GIMP automatically re-import all pictures (layers) in original size. It should keep all layer properties and just recalculate all layers with the higher resolution using the original picture size.

If there is a way to do this? Or another way to get the same result?

Thanks
Chris

I would say Inkscape. It has presets A0,A1 which are poster sizes

Using Inkscape 0.48, PCLOS2010 KDE, an old 3 GHz Pentium 4 with 2 GB ram

For the sake of an experiment I made a 24000 x 18000 page.

Quick test, a patterned background + importing 5 bitmap images ( as links not embedded)

Export to png (no jpg alternative), you have to be careful with the dpi setting or the image will be truly enormous. So 100 dpi gave an image 26667 x 20000 pix (guessing the original was screen dpi) Export took some time to render but the cpu was never maxed and ended up with a 215 MB png file. The svg for saving was 41KB - (hence the linked bitmaps)

Problem now, I can't view the png image, I've come across this before making big mosaics, tried to open in evince, CPU max's, memory max's, swap partition heading for max, as the png unpacks. Killed it before it locked the machine. Still have the svg for viewing/editing and presumably a printing company will handle big bitmap files.