Gerard Meijssen wrote:
I blogged about the 15 meter Indonesian story cloth that has been restored and patched into a single 992.4 MB file by Durova. Using the MediaWiki software, it is unmanageably big. There are many image files that are too big to handle.
Djatoka is open source software that allows us to manage files that are a tad too big.
Displaying large images is one field for future work.
How to take such pictures is another. Today's 10 or 12 megapixel cameras take pretty big pictures, and soon we might have 20 or 40 megapixel cameras. But even then, we want to stitch many such images together for some uses.
A third area is to take multiple pictures with different levels of exposure, which can be combined into a high dynamic range (HDR) image, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging
A fourth area is to take multiple pictures with different light source directions, to be combined with Polynomial Texture Mapping (PTM), as documented in this Hewlett-Packard research project, http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/ptm/ and shown in this Google Techtalk video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxNg-tXPPWc
All of these are examples of how we no longer take a single small photo, but a whole bunch and combine them into something much larger and much different.
Ten years ago, digital cameras were very expensive, and we all used scanners to digitize our photos after the film was processed and they were printed on paper. In the coming decade, digital cameras will probably evolve in ways that never could be achieved with old, chemical photography.