title: Stitching large amounts of images together into one gigapixel image
body: <p>So I'm trying to get a sattelite map of my township that is available for offline use, and I used <a href="http://www.allmapsoft.com/umd/" rel="nofollow">Universal Maps Downloader</a> to download from bing's hybrid maps. That all worked fine, but when I used the program's built in image stitcher, I found that the resulting bitmap image was so large that it isn't a usable bitmap. Photoshop and all image viewers I can get my hands on won't view it (I'm guessing because bitmaps aren't supposed to be 6gb in size)</p>
  
  <p>So I'm wondering if A.) there are any programs to stitch/view a ton (~45,000) of smaller images as one large image, or B.) any file formats that would handle an image of this size a little bit better than bitmap, and any programs that I could use to stitch the smaller images into that format (the built in stitcher in UMD only does bitmap)</p>