Making a large zoomable map

[Tharsoum]

I've three .jpg images of continents around 5000x5000 [px]. I want to merge them in a same world-wide map, but the resulting image would be absurdly enormous. Is there any good software/trick for doing this without needing to shrink the .jpg's?

[foremost]

Are you merging them for any specific purpose (printing, publication, etc...)?

The result would be enormous... may even lead to crashing the program when you want to save.
The only was to make it less demanding would be decrease the resolution, but doing so really sucks on maps.
Merging three big items would probably require resolution that would render the labels unreadable.
Plus, uploading to the guild, if you plan to do so, may not work out with a large file. But I encourage you to try it.

Best of luck
FM

[jbgibson]

Might depend on the images themselves - some would look just fine as more efficient formats than jpg. 5000x5000x3 monochrome or grayscale could succeed as gif...

Do you care much about the in-between spaces -- or another way to ask - are these three *small* continents such that the world at the same scale would be 30,000 x 60,000 pixels? Or do these 5k sq views add up to the whole world already? A collection of zoomed-in continent maps and an overall locator map at vastly smaller scale makes sense if the oceans are featureless voids. If they have important islands, trade routes, currents, and suchlike, 'tis a different matter.

What's the mapping for?

[Tharsoum]

Those maps had road networks, urban areas (for the "modern" version of the world; there are three versions), names, etc. in different layers in a .psd file besides the .jpg ones, so I wanted to make a zoomable map somewhat similar to Google Maps. Proportion between ocean and land is sort of balanced (maybe a bit more of land area), and there are some small islands lost in the ocean. The entire world map would be around 10-15k of width and 8-12k of height, in order not to "lose" the details. I also wanted to build a more detailed terrain relief keeping the mountainous distribution I've initially thought on the continents, but that seems to require a lot of work to do. I tried importing a "prototype image" into Google Earth, but max. texture size forced me to shrink the image to less than half of the original one and the result wasn't really good.

I'll try with another formats, anyways.

I'm not sure if I correctly interpreted your last question, but the purpose would just be recreational. I'm not considering any tournament or similar thing so far. I'll explain further in detail in another thread.