I finished my little snap shot image yesterday. After cutting it up and reassembling it it looks great, and works fine for the client. We just mail them a thumbdrive instead of truing to FTP a monster file.
The file on the hard drive is "just" 10 GB, but that is with LZW lossless compression. As you can see the image is actually a 36.7 GB image. At least Photoshop will let me open it and see it. I can remember when the limits were 20,000 pixels in either dimension. Now if they will decide to change the limit and let me save it I will love them again. For now I am gonna keep cussing them. When several other mapping programs I have don't even blink at opening or editing the files I know it is not a real limit with tif files.
Photoshop does have a large image format that I can save it to with Photoshop, but only Photoshop opens it, so it is useless to me. If they would just make the JPEG2000 format work right that would solve the issue. For now they are just not interested in playing nice.
Of course all of this still amazes me. My first computer hard drive was 10 MB. Then I moved up to a huge 32 MB drive. I remember my first giant huge 1 GB hard drive. I named it Big Drive.
I moved though several computers before I ever got to a drive big enough to store that tif file. It was many years before I got a 500 GB drive. Right now I have two 6 TB hard drives hooked to my system. 6,000 GB each. It still amazes me.