Doesn't Lightroom support large images?

Question

I recently migrated my photos over to Lightroom, but after the export I was given a notice about some images not being imported, because they were too large. These were panoramas with sizes of about 10.000x2000 px and somewhat above, though not exceeding 15.000. Why doesn't Lightroom support these sizes? Are there any hidden settings to play around with?

Answer 1

"It's not the number of GHz that counts, but the tightness of the code. "
No, actually it's both. You can optimize code for certain operations but operations outside of that window will not be. Camera Raw/Lightroom is a case in point. It is VERY well optimized for dealing with raw images from digital cameras. In all cases (except for scanning backs) single captures from DSLR's fall into the 10K limit. Camera Raw/Lightroom has been expended to also work with camera jpgs/tiffs and now with Lightroom and Camera Raw 4 in Photoshop CS3 to general tiffs & psds. But large tiffs and psds is NOT what the original code for Camera Raw Lightroom was optimized for.
Larger memory buffers and faster processors CAN expand on what is possible with code optimizations alone-which are not sufficient alone to improve applications. Even if you could optimize the code, the pure processor clicks required could not make ACR/LR run on old, slow processors.
If you count the pure numbers of images digitally captured each year to the pure numbers of photographers doing panos, panos are an edge case. ACR/LR is designed for the masses of images, not edge case use at this time. Arguably, improved pano software (such as in Photoshop CS3) may increase the numbers of photographers engaging in pano creation, which would be a good argument for increasing the upper limit that ACR/LR can handle...but it ain't gonna happen immediately.