I'm going to need more RAM

So I got into photo stitching - making panoramas (360 deg cylindrical projection, etc) .

I took 11 shots of the scenery from the hill behind my parents' house. I loaded all 11 images (6 megapixels each) into some stitching software and let it go to town. I had to fiddle with some control points - though the software is very good at auto setting them. And I didn't like the way the images were blended because even after fixing the control points, there were places that didn't quite match up - the software just blends them in the middle of the overlap. So I saved the output to a layered TIFF file in order to manually blend the images. TIFF is a lossless compression so it doesn't generate very small files like JPEG. The layered TIFF is over 500 Mb. When opened for editing, the gimp reports that the image is consuming over 700 Mb. After blending the seams, it's taking up over 900 Mb.

The Gimp is a very cool application. It uses it's own disk cache and tile caches large images, so the only hard limit on how large an image you can edit is the amount of free space on the drive where it is storing the cache. However, long before reaching this limit, unless you have very little free space, you would find that editing very large images becomes impossibly slow - there's no way around this other than increasing the RAM size.

So I need to get more RAM. I believe that PC systems top out at 4 Gigs (linux systems may be able to overcome this, but I'm not sure), but I don't think this is enough - what do I do when I have a 20 something megapixel camera and attempt stitches with 50 or more photos? Resize before stitching? I think not!


I must build the ultimate photo stitching computer.