can't import more than 1GB on Geotiff

[mrgenie]

I have now a big collection of drone imagery of the city - with the explicit permission I'm allowed to use it for OpenStreetMap mapping - due to privacy&copyright issues of what might be on the images I can't use a public server so gotta keep it local - but the problem is I can't load more than 1GB of geotiff data ..

So a 4GB file simply fails. JOSM can't import it.

and splitting it into 16 files, I can load 3 files. File nr 4 will not be loaded anymore.

The JOSM RAM usage at this point is 3.8GB

is JOSM limited by the famous 32bit aka 4GB memory allocation limitation?
or is this a plugin thing?

Are there settings I can use, to allow JOSM to use more RAM?

Is there another reason for this to fail?

[taylor.smock]

The problem is that the plugin does not attempt to tile large images. You _can_ get JOSM to use more memory (see wiki:Download#Outofmemory ), but that likely isn't going to be the "best" solution.

I would instead recommend using something like ​https://geoserver.org/ to serve the images (it will tile them so that you aren't loading a 1GB image into memory, instead it will be downsampled to match the current zoom level). This will also significantly speed up the render loop, since the plugin won't be trying to render the whole image every time something changes.

Something to keep in mind is that geotiff is a compressed image format. This means that a 1GB file will load into memory with a _lot more_ than 1 GB of RAM. Which is what you are seeing (1 GB geotiff -> ~3.3 GB RAM, if I had to make a guess). So, if you want to load a 4GB file into JOSM, you will want at least 14GB of RAM allocated to JOSM (13.2 GB of that would be for the image).

EDIT: I should mention that you can run the server on a local machine without exposing it to the internet.

[mrgenie]

Thank you for this information - I'll try to host local then - because the imagery I have explicit permission to use it to map on OSM - yet due to the extreme high level of detail - for privacy and copyright reasons I can't make it public.

The city is doing every month now 0.5 to 1 square km on high-resolution imagery and sharing it only with me for OSM mapping purposes.

So local I'll try to setup this Geoserver then.

[stoecker]

I successfully used Mapserver ​https://mapserver.org/ for such purposes.

There is also QGIS server ​https://live.osgeo.org/en/quickstart/qgis_mapserver_quickstart.html