[FWTools] gdal_merge output file size

[Adam Yesaitis]

Hello friends,

    I am new to Gdal so please excuse me if my questions are a bit basic.
    I am currently using FWtools version 2.2.1.  My attempt is to mosaic large amounts of .tif files using gdal_merge.  I have done this successfully using gdal_merge to mosaic and compress the file into and lzw or packbits compression.... I then further compress the files into G4 compression, using gdal_translate, in order to yield reasonable file sizes... between 9 and 20 MB preferably for larger datasets. 
     When I use this process with smaller sets of images(7MB over 30 files)  the output files come out fine.  However when I move to larger datasets (13MB over 150 files) the ouptut is corrupted and will not open.  
    I would appreciate any suggestions to help me limit output file size ( as when i mosaic the larger datasets the uncompressed output is well over a gig per map) to the smallest it can possibly be.  Even when I merge large datasets using G4 compression alone the output files are over 100MB.

Thank you kindly in advance,

Adam Yesaitis
Western Technologies Group
Tel: 908-725-1143
Fax: 908-725-1488
E-mail: adamy at wtgroupllc.com
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