<i>Better</i> graphics programs will not attempt to put the whole image into RAM, but only decompress the pieces needed for processing it.<p>I remember working with multi-megapixel images on systems with far less than 1MB of RAM, many years ago. Perhaps this is a good example of how more hardware resources can lead to them being wasted - the fact that RAM has grown so much that <i>most</i> images fit completely in it, has also meant programmers assuming they can do this for <i>all</i> images without a second thought when often all that&#x27;s needed is a tiny subset of all the data.<p>Even if the image data is compressed, there&#x27;s absolutely no need to keep all of it in memory - just decompress incrementally into a small, fixed-size buffer until you get to the &quot;plaintext&quot; position desired, ignoring everything before that. The fact that it&#x27;s compressed also means that, with suitable algorithms, you can skip over huge spans at once - this is particularly easy to do with RLE and LZ - and the compression ratio actually boosts the speed of seeking to a specific position.<p>Currently, (hopefully...) no application is attempting to read entire video files into memory before processing them, but I wonder if that might change in the future as RAM becomes even bigger, and we&#x27;ll start to get &quot;video decompression bombs&quot; instead?