creating montage of hundreds of images

[manit]

When I give lot of files as input to montage then RAM usage increases & system hangs though I gave -geometry 512x512 option which i believe should make montage handle large files(in MB) with ease because if it takes only 512x512 thumbnail into memory then there should be no space problem.is there any other way through which i can create montage of hundreds of files?

[magick]

Add -limit memory 1mb to your command line to force the pixel processing to disk rather than memory. If you can use wildcards you can try inline resizing like this '*.png[128x128]'.

[manit]

I found that with option
-limit memory 1mb
the usage of RAM decreased while swap usage increased.Thanks a lot.

[manit]

Do you think that inline resizing means a small image is loaded into memory instead of large one?

[magick]

Assume your average frame size is 1000x1000. With inline resizing, your images are resized as they are read so only the thumbnails are keep in memory or on disk as they are processed. Without inline resizing the original 1000x1000 images are kept in memory or on disk which of course consumes much more resources and is generally slower to process.

[anthony]

If you are reading LOTS of images and plan to make a montage of thumbnails. You best resize the images as they are read in. For example 'image_*.jpg[100x100]'

See IM Examples, Thumbnails
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/thumbnails/
read the introductionary areas throughly!

Also see Reading images
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/files/#read

[manit]

I found that with inline resizing my RAM condumption was meager & on adding swap file usage option it worked better.

TIP FOR ALL
So to all guys who have trouble making montage of hundreds of high resolution images add the option
-limit memory 1mb "file.extension[128x126]"
NOTE here 128x126 is default size of thumbnail which appears in montage.

[anthony]

To stop montage doing its own resizing set geometry without any 'size' option, just the tile spacing options. for example -geometry +10+10

See Montage, Geometry...
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/montage/