Maximum resolution

tfboy

Dear SM,
after being a little confused why some of my photos were apparently being resampled, I think I've found the answer buried in the support section: photos are limited to 100MP in resolution.

May I suggest you add this to your feature set, http://www.smugmug.com/features as it mentions the 50MB file size limit (which I am under at about 22MB), but no mention of the 100MP resolution limitation.

Are there any plans to increase this? I'm using SM more and more as an online backup for my high quality finished JPEGs, but the 100MP is kind of a limitation. If storage isn't an issue, why the 100MP limit? Is it a limitation of your Lanzcos resizing algorithms or something?

Ben

Hi Xavier,

I will pass along the feedback on the features page. It's hard to list everything there that matters to people, without that list getting truly out of control.

I can pretty much guarantee that limit will increase over time. I don't know when, but I can personally remember dozens of times we have bumped it up. It is usually set high enough to accommodate pretty much all commonly available cameras, including pretty high end cameras. We do have customers shooting right now on medium format cameras, often up to 80MP or so. We know those will continue increasing the pixel count, and when we started the site a dozen megapixels was super high end.

Historically, the main limitation has indeed been image processing. Rotation specifically has been incredibly slow for really high megapixel counts, and we have customers who will go through and rotate thousands of images in a single gallery, all at once. We try and strike a balance between supporting really high end photography projects, and preventing a single customer from crippling the entire image processing infrastructure.

I will make sure the Product team sees your request for more than 100MP. In order to understand the use case better, can you explain what you are doing? Are you stitching panos? What number of pixels are you ending up at for most of them?

FWIW, one of our cofounders (Baldy), has an obsession with stitching REALLY huge panos. So you definitely have sympathy here!

tfboy

Ben wrote: »

Hi Xavier,

I will pass along the feedback on the features page. It's hard to list everything there that matters to people, without that list getting truly out of control.

I can pretty much guarantee that limit will increase over time. I don't know when, but I can personally remember dozens of times we have bumped it up. It is usually set high enough to accommodate pretty much all commonly available cameras, including pretty high end cameras. We do have customers shooting right now on medium format cameras, often up to 80MP or so. We know those will continue increasing the pixel count, and when we started the site a dozen megapixels was super high end.

Historically, the main limitation has indeed been image processing. Rotation specifically has been incredibly slow for really high megapixel counts, and we have customers who will go through and rotate thousands of images in a single gallery, all at once. We try and strike a balance between supporting really high end photography projects, and preventing a single customer from crippling the entire image processing infrastructure.

I will make sure the Product team sees your request for more than 100MP. In order to understand the use case better, can you explain what you are doing? Are you stitching panos? What number of pixels are you ending up at for most of them?

FWIW, one of our cofounders (Baldy), has an obsession with stitching REALLY huge panos. So you definitely have sympathy here!

Hi Ben,
Thanks for the comprehensive answer, it's most appreciated

I understand that even with medium format or ridiculously large scans, photos rarely get into the 100MP range. The one I was working with was actually a high resolution render from 3D modelling which explains why the size isn't that high in terms of MB.

I often work with very large stitched panos too I probably have a few well over 100MP, (I did a stitch of around 100 36MP photos from my D800 a year or so ago) although I didn't try uploading them to SM, but I guess I that could soon become a request / requirement. No doubt Baldy is pushing enough already on that front

edit: my render was around 150MP count, it was 14400x10547. I could render more sometimes, it's useful if working with advertising and you have the ability to render at stupid resolutions giving great print quality options for billboards

Ben

tfboy wrote: »

Hi Ben,
Thanks for the comprehensive answer, it's most appreciated

I understand that even with medium format or ridiculously large scans, photos rarely get into the 100MP range. The one I was working with was actually a high resolution render from 3D modelling which explains why the size isn't that high in terms of MB.

I often work with very large stitched panos too I probably have a few well over 100MP, (I did a stitch of around 100 36MP photos from my D800 a year or so ago) although I didn't try uploading them to SM, but I guess I that could soon become a request / requirement. No doubt Baldy is pushing enough already on that front

edit: my render was around 150MP count, it was 14400x10547. I could render more sometimes, it's useful if working with advertising and you have the ability to render at stupid resolutions giving great print quality options for billboards

Thanks for the details, I would never have guessed a render. That makes a lot of sense.