You can see people’s faces from miles away in the 195 gigapixel photo of Shanghai.

As an engineer this is amazing, as a citizen the privacy implications are terrifying.

Your average smartphone camera is around 12 megapixels. This image of Shanghai is 195 gigapixels. One megapixel equals one million pixels, a gigapixel equals one billion pixels.

Put another way, this image is 16,250 times larger than the image you can take with your smart phone.

Let’s see what that feels like through the BigPixel viewer looking at the roof top of a building a few miles away.