Gigapixel Photography: From the Gigapxl Project to Billion-Pixel Panoramas (2026)

In 2006 we marvelled at the Gigapxl Project, a custom camera that captured 4,000-megapixel photographs of America on giant sheets of film, at a time when most of us carried 4 to 6 megapixel cameras. Today phones shoot 200 megapixels and enthusiasts stitch panoramas of many billions of pixels at home. Here is how gigapixel photography started, how it works in 2026, and how you can make your own gigapixel image.

Quick answer: Gigapixel photography means making images of one billion pixels or more. A few special cameras, like the Gigapxl camera, captured them in one exposure on large film. Today almost all gigapixel images are made by shooting hundreds of overlapping photos with a long lens, often on a robotic panoramic head, and stitching them with software such as PTGui or the free Hugin.

The Gigapxl Project (2000 to 2000s)

The Gigapxl Project, started in the fall of 2000 by Graham Flint with Catherine Aves and Michael T. Jones, built a large-format camera that recorded single exposures on film detailed enough to scan at up to four billion pixels. Its goal was a coast-to-coast portrait of America’s cities, parks and monuments, and later an archive of vanishing cultural sites.

• A one-gigapixel image is slightly larger than 44,000 x 22,000 pixels; a four-gigapixel image is 88,000 x 44,000.
• A 4,000-megapixel print could be about 10 by 20 feet.
• One uncompressed 16-bit four-gigapixel file took about 24 GB.

By 2006 the team had taken over 1,200 images. It remains one of very few projects to capture gigapixel photos in a single shot.

How gigapixel photography works today

Film is rare now. Modern gigapixel images are mosaics:

1. Shoot a grid of photos with a telephoto lens, overlapping each frame by 25 to 30%. A city skyline can take hundreds or thousands of frames.
2. Use a panoramic or robotic head, such as the GigaPan robot spun out of Carnegie Mellon, NASA and Google research, to rotate the camera precisely around the lens’s no-parallax point.
3. Lock exposure, focus and white balance so every frame matches.
4. Stitch the frames with PTGui (paid, very fast with gigapixel projects) or Hugin (free and open source).
5. Share it with a zoomable “deep zoom” viewer, since few screens or browsers can open a billion-pixel file directly.

The same stitching approach has produced terapixel images of a trillion pixels, as described in Wikipedia’s article on gigapixel images.

Can a phone take gigapixel photos?

Not in one shot. The highest-resolution phones top out around 200 megapixels, about one-fifth of a gigapixel. But you can make a gigapixel panorama with a phone and patience: shoot a grid of zoomed photos from a tripod and stitch them on a computer.

Tips for your first gigapixel image

• Start with a still subject, such as a skyline or landscape, on a calm, evenly lit day.
• Use a sturdy tripod and a remote shutter to avoid shake.
• Shoot quickly; moving clouds and people cause stitching seams.
• Plan storage: a single project can take tens of gigabytes of photos and stitched files.
• New to stitching? Try a small panorama first; we used Microsoft’s free tool to create panoramic views years ago, and our phone photography tips help with sharp frames.

FAQ

How many megapixels is a gigapixel?

1,000 megapixels, or one billion pixels.

What was the Gigapxl Project?

A project begun in 2000 that used a custom large-format film camera to capture photos of up to four gigapixels in a single exposure, starting with a portrait of America.

What software stitches gigapixel panoramas?

PTGui is the most popular paid option; Hugin is a free alternative.