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Danny Yee, Jasc Paint Shop Pro v8  www.jasc.com) now has scripting, so you could probably use it to do what you ask. It does layers, masks and all for collaging.

Arcsoft Photoimpressions is a piece of software that I got in a bundle somewhere, and does this very well. It is much faster but also less sophisticated than Photoshop, and doesn’t have as much photo editing capability. But for quickly assembling a collage, it does the trick.

For people’s interest, I have posted a couple of medium-size (10,000×7,500-pixel) pixels that were built with FotoFusion using Philip’s pictures of his trip to Mexico.

You’ll find a brief note and links to the images here:
http://www.lumapix.com/media/elements/collages/greenspun/welcome.shtml

The images took literally seconds to create and a few minutes to render. The difference between the top and bottom versions (neatly laid out vs. jumbled) was a single click.

I don’t suppose anyone knows of a command-line tool (for Linux/Unix) for making collages? Creating N layers in the GIMP (or Photoshop) and then piecing them all together sounds like a nightmare, especially if one wants to change the size or placement of individual images later… I’d like to be able to specify the collage with a file containing commands along the lines of

place image1.jpg at 200,100 size 250×100
place image2.jpg at 450,100 size 200×100
etc.

I’m going to agree with everyone else, except for one thing: if you think that automation might be of help, The Gimp might be a better choice than Photoshop. It’s scriptable using a Scheme dialect, and if you know Lisp (and I know you do), the API is easy enough to learn that scripting can be a major timesaver even the first time you script a task. At least it was for me.

Perhaps very simplistic, but montage on Imagemagick creates a simple composition of pictures. From the man page:

montage creates a composite image by combining several
separate images. The images are tiled on the composite
image with the name of the image optionally appearing just
below the individual tile.

The composite image is constructed in the following man

Consider Quark XPress, may be faster for working with that many images if you are not going to be editing them at the same time. It deals with them as previews and the document as postscript (I believe).

I think Photoshop is a really good answer if you already own it. One possible complication is that I believe Photoshop 7 only supports images up to 30,000 x 30,000 pixels. Photoshop CS (or 8 in real numbers) supports up to 300,000 x 300,000. Depending on the resolution you need, you might be forced straight into CS.

We just did a bunch of boxes where I work. I’m not sure of their exact dimensions, but the files were anywhere between 800mb and 1.4gb compressed (in RAM they were *much* bigger). I bumped the artist’s machines from 768mb to 1.25gb midway through the project (using Mac OS X) and it seemed to improve the app’s stability quite a bit.

In any case, as you may be gathering from the comments here, collaging an image this size is not a light undertaking quite yet. Best o’ luck.