OpenGL - using multiple large aerial photo images

My OpenGL application fails to open multiple large aerial photo images. Our large traffic animations allow the user to pan great distances. This requires several large background jpegs to be loaded during one instance.
After loading two of these images successfully, our computers (with abundant resources and video ram) are unsuccessful loading any additional ones. Sometimes low memory system mesages display at that time. We have increased the virtual memory considerably (on machines with abundant free hard disk space) but with the same result. We have considered the option of loading and unloading the images as the user pans the terrain, but the user’s time waiting for this process would be unacceptable.

PLEASE HELP!

this is more of a programming question by the way.

Details about your hardware setup ? OS/ram/CPU/videocard/vram/drivers version/ …