Blender saving large image

I have image from Hugin photo stitch and was painting the poles with Blender in texture paint because I was getting better results or having a difficult time doing it in the photo stitch program. I painted the top and bottom of my sphere two times and when I try to save the tiff or png it does not complete saving just the top or crashes blender.
In gimp I added my pano image to a larger image or to say I expanded the top and bottom. and used this image to paint on in blender.
The image I use in Blender is a tiff. I exported as a tiff and tried png. RGB. default settings. I have no file it crashed.
Im not painting it again unless i understand how to improve my chances of saving.
The image is 15259 px wide but I want to keep the large size

Blender’s memory handling doesn’t really allow for such large textures maps (even if only for painting). As everything is converted to 32 bit to play with you soon max the system out and then the file handling cannot save effectively as it must use more memory to export the image.

Answer, use gimp or similar they are designed for this sort of task.

Oh with that paint add on that lets you paint in gimp. Thainks