[gdal-dev] Re: Problems with large raster sizes (WMS/TMS)

[Tamas Szekeres]

2009/11/13 Seth Price <seth at pricepages.org>:
> Jumping in here, and I may be misunderstanding, but I don't see how we
> would have greater than 2 gigapixel images in the foreseeable future.
> Doing the math: if we represent the entire earth as a single image, each
> pixel would be 2 cm at the equator, and the whole image would be 6291456
> TB in size (24-bit image).
>
> I'm not even sure if it's physically possible to image the globe at better
> than 2 cm.
> ~Seth
>

Seth,

Actually no one would maintain the whole area at the same level of
detail, it would be supported only for some areas at the moment. As an
example see:

http://web0.nearmap.com/?ll=-31.955048,115.849349&z=23&t=h


However we would virtually address the whole image within the domain
of RasterXSize and RasterYSize at tile level 23 in the example above.
And you could pan through the whole world at the same zoom level and
obtain the tiles (at different resolutions of course)


Best regards,

Tamas