We describe a novel epitomic image representation scheme that factors a given image content into a condensed epitome and a low-resolution image to reduce the memory space for images. Given an input image, we construct a condensed epitome such that all image patches can successfully be reconstructed from the factored representation by means of an optimized neighbor-embedding strategy. Under this new scope of epitomic image representations aligned with the manifold sampling assumption, we end up a more generic epitome learning scheme with increased optimality, compactness, and reconstruction stability. We present the performance of the proposed method for image and video up-scaling (super-resolution) while extensions to other image and video processing are straightforward.