

111 Gigapixel photo of Seville sets new world record - vibragiel
http://www.sevilla111.com/

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vibragiel
For those who can't read Spanish, these are some tech details:

The gigapan is composed of 9750 pictures (f16, 1/800 S, ISO800) taken with a
robotized Canon 5D MkII, a 400mm Canon lens and a duplicator (effectively
800mm of focal lens), and put together using Autopano Giga on a PC with two
6-core Xeons, 40GB RAM and 8TB disk space.

Full details:

Spanish: <http://www.sevilla111.com/comosehizo.htm>

Google Translated:
[http://translate.google.es/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sevi...](http://translate.google.es/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sevilla111.com%2Fcomosehizo.htm&sl=es&tl=en&hl=&ie=UTF-8)

~~~
eftpotrm
Photo nerd - the bit of gear they use to turn a 400mm lens into an 800mm lens
is called a 2x teleconverter. You get double the focal length for a reduction
of two stops in the available aperture and generally a loss of optical
resolution.

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jjcm
What record did this break? Largest photo? Call me picky, but I don't see how
this can be deemed a record. If stitched together photos count, then what
about google maps? The average resolution of landmass is 15m for all of google
earth (source:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#Imagery_and_coordi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#Imagery_and_coordination)).
With a total land area of 148,940,000 km^2
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth>) that puts the resolution of google
earth's stitched together images at around 662 gigapixels
([http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(148,940,000+km2+in+m^2...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=\(148,940,000+km2+in+m^2\)+/+\(15^2+m^2\)))
(that seems lower than I expected, anyone want to check my math?). Wouldn't
any stitched image have to beat that at least to be deemed a record?

~~~
kristofferR
They aren't stitched together, they're tiled. When you're loading Google Maps,
you're loading dozens of relatively small resolution images.

~~~
InclinedPlane
And? I don't need to hook up fiddler to know that when I hit sevilla111.com
I'm not pulling down a 0.1 terapixel image all in one go, I'm only ever
loading a teeny tiny (tiled) sub-section of the raw image or a lower res
version of the whole. Which isn't much different than google maps/Earth.

~~~
kristofferR
There's a difference. For this 111GP image there was taken 9750 images. Those
images were then merged together to a single image using Autopano Giga and
then split for the ease of presentation. Google's satelite photography on the
other hand has never been merged into one huge image.

~~~
ghshephard
I'm with the OP. These images have not been merged together to form a single
image. There is no 111 Gigapixel image out there that represents this picture.
As you zoom in, you hit a different tile-layer.

~~~
kristofferR
Well, turns out I wasn't entirely correct for this picture. They rendered it
to three bigass images:
[http://translate.google.es/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sevi...](http://translate.google.es/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sevilla111.com%2Fcomosehizo.htm&sl=es&tl=en&hl=&ie=UTF-8)

For some of the other massive Gigapixel photographs I've seen they've rendered
it down to only one image file:
<http://70gigapixel.cloudapp.net/index_en.html#3>

------
wildmXranat
FYI, some of the photographed sidewalk ads are clickable and take you to the
merchants website.

Location of one of them: Pan left until you see a rombus shaped roof with
square patches of soil and grass on it. Zoom in closer and take look on the
right for a standing sidewalk ad.

~~~
citricsquid
It seems the adverts have been superimposed? I wonder if they're the original
adverts or they sold these "fake" adverts to cover the creation costs?

~~~
wildmXranat
I think so as well. The ads are too clear in comparison to surrounding area.
One other ad I found stuck out a little bit more than the one I posted
earlier.

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ANH
Amazing. On maximum zoom, nearby blades of grass can be distinguished, but the
atmospheric distortion of distant objects makes them look like part of an
impressionist painting.

~~~
rorrr
It's actually very blurry when you zoom all the way in. You can halve the
resolution and not lose any information. So it's really a 111/4 = 27.8
gigapixel panorama.

Compare it with this:

<http://www.paris-26-gigapixels.com/index-en.html>

Which is much sharper when you zoom all the way in.

------
staticshock
Interestingly, all graphical advertisements in the picture have been replaced
with clickable ads for superinventos.com (e.g. the bus stop on the left side
of the river)

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ra
If there ever was a city on Earth who's beauty is worth 111 gigapixels, then
surely it is Seville.

If you ever get the opportunity, GO THERE.

~~~
yread
Quien no ha visto Sevilla - no ha visto Maravilla! but Quien no ha visto
Granada - no ha visto nada!

~~~
balac
"but Quien"

as a British guy living in Spain I can relate to this spanglish :)

~~~
ra
I've never lived in Spain, I visited Seville last year on holiday

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Knack
dragging his horrible ... the google maps way to move on a map is the only way
that should be used.

~~~
jp_sc
You can change it by pressing the hand icon at the bottom bar

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callmeed
Who had the fun job of painting over every license plate?

~~~
rflrob
They actually didn't get them all. On the right side of the image, there are
some cars about to cross that haven't been painted over. I can convince myself
I can read those, though probably not with 100% accuracy.

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bdfh42
And here is Paris - also a good looking town

<http://www.paris-26-gigapixels.com/index-fr.html>

Zoom-able panorama. Not quite so many pixels but still pretty good.

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PostOnce
Isn't this sort of pointless? If it were from a single sensor, or a single
shot of a camera with multiple sensors, it might be something, but anyone can
take a limitless number of zoomed-in images and stitch them together. How
about someone stitches together all the Google street view images of I-95 into
a big panorama? New world record?

~~~
citricsquid
"...anyone could have done x..." is such a silly idea. The point is they
_didn't_ , this guy did. Just like Mark Zuckerberg made Facebook, or that kid
who made Chat Roulette. Anyone _could have_ but they didn't.

~~~
pyre
Shouting about "111 Gigapixel new world record" makes it sound like it's a
technological break-through. In reality it's the equivalent of "the world's
largest candy bar" or "the world's largest taco."

~~~
lambda
It said "world record" not "technological breakthrough." The Guiness Book of
_World Records_ lists things like the world's largest candy bar or world's
largest taco, not anything like significant technological breakthroughs.

~~~
pyre
You also have to consider the forum/audience.

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vibragiel
It turns out there's a bigger 152 Gigapixel photograph of Rio de Janeiro,
published in September: <http://www.gigapan.org/gigapans/58857/>

Much more crappy in my opinion, but certainly bigger, so this photo of Seville
would not set a world record.

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aspiringsensei
As a former Sevilla resident, nice to click around for a while.

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madmaze
I wish it were possible to down load the original image(s), it would make a
great computing challenge for some of my friends trying to learn GPU
processing with MPI =)

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JCTony
Does google have this technology?

I remember when at best buy managers at bestbuy had me pushing the 7 megapixel
Sony's 3 years back.

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Knack
Hey, you can read the wristwatch of one guy!! Awesome resolution ... But they
should pixelize the faces properly.

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ivankirigin
Someone should build a zombie sniper game into a gigapan like this.

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pdx
They have gone through and obfuscated the car plate numbers.

