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What’s the Largest Image Size You Can Import Into Lightroom?

You can import very large images into Lightroom, but there are limits.

Lightroom Maximum Image Size 65000px

Categories: Importing into Lightroom
Tags: Lightroom CC/6, Lightroom Classic
Last updated about 1 year ago // Originally published about 5 years ago

You can import very large images into Lightroom, but there are limits. They’re well beyond the sizes that any standard camera or scanner creates natively, but you can run into the limit particularly if you work with high resolution stitched panoramas.

In that case, you might run into this error: “The file is too big.”

Lightroom File Too Big

By ‘too big’ it’s referring not to filesize, as the error message seems to suggest, but to pixel dimensions. And there are two limits you can run into.

65,000 Pixel Sides

The first is that Lightroom has a hard limit of 65,000 wide or tall (or both). If your image is bigger than that you won’t be able to import it into Lightroom. It’s not hard to run into that size limit with stitched high-resolution panoramas, especially when using something like a GigaPan.

512 Megapixels

The other limit to watch out for is that there’s a hard limit of 512 megapixels. That applies even if your sides are under 65,000.

To calculate how many megapixels your image is, multiple the number of pixels wide by the number of pixels high and then divide by a million (or move the decimal point 6 places to the left). Or you can use a calculator like this one.

Again, it’s pretty easy to run over that limit if you’re creating gigapixel panoramas.

How to Make the Image Smaller

There’s no way using Lightroom’s image importing dialogue to resize images. And since you can’t get it into the Lightroom catalog to begin with, there’s no way to resize it within Lightroom.

So you’ll need to use some other software to modify the image dimensions before you try importing. If you’re already using Photoshop, that’s an obvious choice. You can crop the image by changing the canvas size, which removes part/s of the image (Image > Canvas Size).

Lightroom Oversize Image Crop

You can resize the image, which preserves the entire image but shrinks it (Image > Image Size).

Lightroom Oversize Images

Or you can use the crop tool and specify dimensions using the options in the top toolbar, which again removes part of the image from one or more sides.

You don’t have to use Photoshop, of course. Any image editing app worth its salt will include cropping or resizing options. Some of the less sophisticated ones might, however, have problems working with very large files. Two good free options are Gimp (an open-source Photoshop competitor) and Irfanview (a very useful and powerful image toolbox). And there are plenty of others.

Importing the Resized Image

Once you’ve reduced the pixel dimensions to 65,000px or less, you’ll be able to import the photo into Lightroom normally. Well, so long as it’s not CMYK or in PNG format, but those are different types of limitations.

More Lightroom Tips & Tricks:

  • How to Speed Up Importing Photos Into Lightroom
    How to Speed Up Importing Photos Into Lightroom
  • Does Editing JPGs in Lightroom Reduce Image Quality?
    Does Editing JPGs in Lightroom Reduce Image Quality?
  • How to Make Image Stack Icons Visible Again
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  • How to Resize Thumbnails in Lightroom's User Interface
    How to Resize Thumbnails in Lightroom's User Interface
  • How to Use Lightroom's Layout Image Loupe Overlay Feature
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  • How to Find the Original Image File on Your Hard Drive
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  • How to Resize Photos in Lightroom Classic
    How to Resize Photos in Lightroom Classic
  • How to Import from Multiple Memory Cards at Once into Lightroom
    How to Import from Multiple Memory Cards at Once into Lightroom
  • How to Batch Rename Image Filenames
    How to Batch Rename Image Filenames
By David Coleman

Last updated on January 28, 2020

Categories: Importing into Lightroom Versions: Lightroom CC/6, Lightroom Classic

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Comments

  1. Diego says

    October 25, 2016 at 8:45 pm

    I have a problem with import: i’m trying to import a scan took from a large format negative, and it’s size is of 28863 × 22933 pxl. According to this article i should be able to import it, but i’m receiving the “File is too big” error. What am i doing wrong?
    Thank you

    Reply
    • david says

      October 26, 2016 at 1:51 pm

      You’ve run over the other limit: 512 megapixels. I’ve added a section above to clarify.

      Reply

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David Coleman Photography

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