I tried to make a jpg bigger than mathematically possible out of an entire year's worth of PC Gamer magazine pages

We recently had a full archive of PC Gamer magazines digitised for us, covering the very inception of our illustrious 33 year-old publication right up to 2008. Some lucky human had to dig into the archive in the regularly flooded basement of PC Gamer towers and scan each and every page.

I've been noodling around with different ways to use these funky little assets of ours in interesting ways, and Jacob suggested why not use them to create photo mosaics, with the individual pages working effectively as pixels for an image.

So, that's exactly what I am presenting to you here, below. This is at over 6000% zoom into the overall image, and it will go up to 11000% zoom but the resolution in the individual jpgs break down zoomed that tightly in. Still, start slowly zooming out and let me know how quickly you guess what the overall image is, I would definitely recommend hitting the fullscreen button, btw. The year was 2004, if you want a hint.

Zoom out and see how quickly you guess the image

So, how quickly did you guess? Of course I picked the year 2004 specifically, and this image is built from every issue of PC Gamer, including specials, to build out the full picture.

I should get out of the way right up front that this is not an AI generated image. Though I did use Google's AI Studio to help me create a Python script to analyse the original image using Pillow (PIL) and then manage, crop, and rasterise using pypdfium2. That script then uses further libraries to run colour matching and image stitching to create the final mosaic to match the target image, again using PIL and also numpy.

So the actual process of parsing the pages and creating the image is all done via a Python script, on my home PC, with no AI processing baked in.

I have also used AI Studio to help get the viewer above to actually embed on the site, because I don't think anyone would thank me for dropping an 800 MB image onto this page for you guys to wait to render. It primarily relies on the open-source OpenSeadragon viewer to access the image and provide the fully zoomable experience, with the Deep Zoom (DZI) API doing the pyramid rendering grunt work.

And I learned a lot in the process. Primarily that there are very specific mathematical limits to how big a jpg you can create. I learned that the hard way by trying to create an image that exceeded the absolute mathematical limits of the jpg standard. The hard jpg limit is 65,535 px and I had was trying to get the Python script to generate an 81,920 x 109,568 image.

So, I had to scale back my ambitions.

There's no such limit to pngs, however, so I could potentially flip to that file format, but I fear straying into multi-gigabtyte sized image files. Though at least you'd be able to read the actual magazine pages more easily.

I also discovered a way to absolutely max out the 64 GB memory capacity of my home PC, too. The python script that runs through the whole mosaic creation process slams the memory, to the point where at times it was chowing down on 52 GB of the expensive stuff. I was watching on Task Manager in case it did bad things, and the system as a whole slowed to a crawl at points.

Let me know in the comments if there are other PC Gaming classics you would like to see rendered using the pages of this fine publication, and I'll put some more together.