MSPaint is awesome for one thing only

I don't know if anyone has realised, but if MS Paint does nothing else well, it is tops at opening very large images. And i'm not just talking about big desktop wallpaper images, i'm talking about images over a gigabyte!

Yesterday i was playing around with Golly and i generated a huge pattern about 32,000 x 37,000 pixels. I saved it as an RLE file but Golly uses it's own format for that so i wrote a little program to convert it to a 4-bit indexed bitmap file. The file size is 549Mb! I thought there was no way Paint would open an image that big and was even contemplating writing my own little viewer to read chunks of it from file and display only a section at a time. But i didn't have to because Paint opened it beautifully . I could scroll around fairly quickly (with a delay of about a second before it refreshed the display) and could even zoom in/out!

Gimp can open it too, but it took about 2 minutes to load it and still hasn't displayed it as i am writing this, it's been over 10 minutes! The physical memory graph in Process Explorer looks like mountain ranges as Gimp struggles to manage moving the data from physical to virtual memory and back.
Ok, it's done loading after about 15 minutes. Here is a screenshot of the full (scaled) image (pretty cool, huh):
http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/7519/gollyworm1042015after72.th.png
Gimp does have to do more processing than Paint, like scaling the image to fit in the window, but Paint will load and display it in under 10 seconds. It even took about 5 minutes to shut down! The only thing Gimp does faster is scrolling when at 1:1 zoom due to the fact that it uses tiles to break up the amount of work it has to do.

I am not posting this for any reason other than to express my awe at how such a simple little program, which i'm sure wasn't designed with this use case in mind, can open such large files so quickly.

 

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Bravo for you, XTAL256 - it's refreshing to find a kudos for anything Microsoft, these days...

I've been using Paint for years - still do...quick, simple, to the point...of course, it lags behind other apps for other purposes, but as a pure bitmap manipulator, it's hard to beat...

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Hi XTAL256, nice to know I am not the only one who uses MS Paint! :-D I like it too, for editing some pics.. Not all of them, but once in a while, I will take a pic that needs a little extra and open it in paint, and ZOOM in big-time and I like the grid too, it makes for editing very nice

 

I don't use Paint all the time but it's good for quick bitmap editing. But for any other use i use Gimp.