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World's Biggest Photo: 272 Gigapixel Image Made With Canon 7D Camera

Huffington Post UK  |  By Posted: 30/04/2012 11:30 Updated: 30/04/2012 15:10

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You're looking at the world's largest photo.

The whopping shot of Shanghai is 272 gigapixels, and was made with a £1000 Canon 7D Camera.

It's size outshines a 70 gigapixel (70 billion pixels) whopper of Budapest, an 80 gigapixel image of London , a remarkable 26 gigapixel image of Dresden and an 8 gigapixel image of the Milky Way.

To compare the shot you your average household digital camera snaps shots, they usually come up between two and 20 megapixels.

The amazingly detailed image won a competition to create the world's largest digital photo.

It's not just one shot though, the massive image is 12,000 photos stitched together.

So how big is a 272 gigapixel image exactly? 1 gigapixel is 1000 megapixels, which is 1 billion pixels. So we're looking at 272 billion pixels, which is large enough to cover 7000 billboards.

Alfred Zhao the photographer who took the image of the Shanghai's rooftops using the Canon 7D with a GigaPan EPIC Pro robotic camera mount.

Zhao said in a statement: "I never imagined such fierce competition. This is not the end of my panorama journey, it is a new start, challenging the limit is an infinite process. New records will appear in the future, it is only a matter of time."

Check out some of the incredible detail in the shot below.


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You're looking at the world's largest photo. The whopping shot of Shanghai is 272 gigapixels, and was made with a £1000 Canon 7D Camera. It's size outshines a 70 gigapixel (70 billion pixels) ...
You're looking at the world's largest photo. The whopping shot of Shanghai is 272 gigapixels, and was made with a £1000 Canon 7D Camera. It's size outshines a 70 gigapixel (70 billion pixels) ...
 
 
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video360
127 Fans
 
11:39 PM on 05/03/2012
Congrats to my friend Alfred Zhao on his Shanghai image and to HuffPo for picking up the gigapixel story. Many of us have been enjoying this new medium since David Bergman's Obama Inauguration GigaPan image went around the world. My largest image is just over 20 GigaPixels, but it was from the stage at U2's 360° Tour in Anahiem, CA, and has tens of thousands of U2 fans who have tagged themselves on Facebook. check it out here - http://www.u2.com/gigapixelfancam/110618/ - I also shot one at a Pittsburgh Steelers game last year - http://www.steelers.com/fancam/111009/. I restarted my career after a layoff from my marketing job in 2009 with gigapixel photography, shooting a gigapixel virtual tour of the Grand Canyon by raft on an 18 day expedition for Google Earth and Bing Maps. Over half a million have now explored the Canyon via my images from Grand Canyon GigaView. Today, I'm Portland, OR's "Google-Trusted" Photographer, shooting similarly composited panoramic images INSIDE Portland's businesses for Google Maps new Business StreetView service - http://maps.google.com/help/maps/businessphotos/get-started.html.
You can find over 400 GigaPixel panoramas I've posted to Photosynth.net under the name GigaView and on Gigapan.com under GigaView360.

Alfred, I've been using the old SeaDragon app from Microsoft to show off the zoom in this Shanghai image for over a year in iPhone demos. Thank you for such a powerful example of the medium. ZOOM, ZOOM, ZOOM!
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Jason Foley
6 Fans
06:03 AM on 05/03/2012
Prepare to enter a new era of Where's Waldo.
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photo
JohnLThornton
3 Fans
 
05:00 AM on 05/03/2012
Hey, with my laptop, smartphone and the Hugin program, I could knock one of these out in a few hours! {Only joking!}

Seriously though, couldn't he have chosen somewhere with a more appealing viewpoint?
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stanton35686
110 Fans
12:44 AM on 05/03/2012
What kind of hardware did he use to piece all this together? Even with a 64-Bit operating system (so that you can go beyond the 2 gig RAM per app & its data), we would be talking a ridiculous amount of memory. Would imagine he'd probably need a zillion cores to chomp through it, too.. assuming the application was highly-threaded. Even with a GPU instead of a CPU.. I can't envisage this project being done on rudimentary hardware. The system requirements are just too high. Yes, it's "only" 12,000 photo's stitched together, but ask anyone who's ever tried editing images how laborious and memory-intensive even basic stuff is.. they'll say the same. This task is immense.
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stanton35686
110 Fans
12:37 AM on 05/03/2012
Tell that bloke in room 463 to change the channel.. there's a good film on with some semi-naked women. Also tell him his cat wants to go out for poo.
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Leah G Cartoonist
live and let live
150 Fans
11:55 AM on 05/02/2012
Erm...for the pixel illiterate amongst us...(ie most) how about telling us the size in real terms...metres? As it is the article is meaningless.
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photo
HUFFPOST SUPER USER
Paul Wagland
Resistance is fertile
253 Fans
05:44 PM on 05/02/2012
That depends how big you make each pixel.... they aren't a set size. It's more a measure of how much information has been captured than the size it's displayed at.

As a rough guide though, magazines tend to print at 300dpi (dots per inch, whereby the dots are pixels).
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HUFFPOST SUPER USER
albertgraphics
91 Fans
08:12 PM on 05/02/2012
Pixel is raw data. 272 Gigapixels in a perfectly square image would be a 521536x521536 pixel image (this one is not square but for example's sake). Back in the 80s, a billboard printer would require 29dpi images. That means that in 521536x521536 image @29dpi there's enough information to create a fairly detailed 1500ft x 1500ft billboard.
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Leah G Cartoonist
live and let live
150 Fans
10:21 AM on 05/03/2012
Thank you...I understood that last couple of words...hehe :)
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myfunnybean
3 Fans
08:23 PM on 05/01/2012
gbth
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Stevie Bee
20 Fans
06:32 PM on 05/01/2012
Oh dear, the 'pixel mania' rides again. More pretentious rubbish..it isn't a 'journey' it's a composite of lots of separate images. The only skill is the ability to use photoshop and having the time to do it, little involving composition.
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Kurtiss Jackson
151 Fans
01:45 AM on 05/02/2012
hahaha. you're so right.
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thaneb
105 Fans
01:35 PM on 05/01/2012
This "photo" is NOT a single image taken with a camera. Images were off-loaded to a laptop and knit together to make the final image. Given time, appropriate hardware and software the size of the final image is whatever the maker decides it to be. Seems a pointless photo competition. More a tech competition. To compare these final constructed images with everyday snaps is just silly. Not even apples to oranges, just a misleading comparison.
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eroth
Cuts & scrapes just like Iggy Pop thrown in a hole
27 Fans
 
05:52 PM on 05/01/2012
I think you may not understand the panorama photo community. It's large, it's got a lot of interest and support from major technology players, and it has a lot of enthusiastic participants. It also is all about photo stitching. There's no comparison that I can see in the article above to regular photos. The Budapest and Paris photos mentioned above are also stitched.
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