Too big images and memory limitations in CooRecorder

[Lars-Ake]

Here is a question that comes up about twice a year:

I'm having an issue opening some scanned photos. Basically, when I try to open a large photo, I get the message "Out of memory." and I can't get the photo to open. I assume this is because the images is too large in file size, but they're only a 5.7-12.0 megabyte images. I don't want to downsize the quality of these images because some of the rings are crowded and will then be hard to see. Any solutions?

Scanners going slowly for a long time can import very very big files into our machines. But there are lots of programs that cannot handle such big files. A 10 Mb JPG (!!!) file is usually a very big file!

The biggest JPG (!) file I could find on my machine is 5.4 MByte. When opened in Photoshop, I can see that its pixels dimension is 83.7 MB with 9860*2964 pixels (scanned in 1200 dpi) Such a file can be opened on my machine with both CooRecorder 5 and 7.

Though if I expand the file to 9860*9000 pixels then I cannot open it in CooRecorder 7 any longer - signals "Out of memory". That file is then 254 MB in pixel size, though only 11.6 MB on my hard disk!

I.e. you cannot look only at the .jpg file size as the pictures are compressed in these files. The actual pixel size which occupies internal memory is what counts!

Though the old version CooRecorder 5.3 .... can open that big file! ....though if memory is a limit in your machine then neither CooRecorder 5.3 nor 7 will make it...

I see only two ways out of this:
1. You have some editing software which can extract suitable strips from your big files and then you "feed" CooRecorder with that smaller image. I.e. you use a cropping tool to create smaller images out of these big ones.
2. You scan your sample images as smaller files.

Note 1: Try to avoid scanning files with one pixel dimension having more than 32000 pixels!
Some software (e.g. my old Photoshop 6.0 copy) will not open such a file at all, though total file size may be very limited.
There should be no problem with CooRecorder 5, but you may encounter problems with some old version Photoshop and some other image editors.

Note2: You can use up to 64000 pixels in width OR in length with CooRecorder 7, but I recommend keeping below the 32000 limit so that all images can be opened with old software versions like Photoshop 6.0

[Lars-Ake]

Just found out that a 9800 by 18000 pixels .tif image stored as 520 MB on my disc can easily
be opened in CooRecorder on Petra's 64 bit machine running Windows 7 with 6 GB memory installed.

So it seems that the CooRecorder's memory problem has been much released when using a modern 64 bit Windows machine!