If your organization participates in LARIAC, then you probably know that right now you have Early Access to the 2017 imagery (both orthos and obliques) in Pictometry’s online CONNECTExplorer application. Keep in mind the Early Access imagery still has work to be done on it, but at least you can take a look at the new stuff while they are working on it.
One thing you can do is bring some of the ortho imagery into your ArcGIS Desktop environment. Here are the simple steps to do so:
- Login to ConnectExplorer and zoom to the area you are interested in. Make sure to set the imagery date to “Early Access”.
- Next, set your Export Image preferences to output a GeoTIFF and turn off scale image, north pointer, and image date if you want. You do not need a world file for a GeoTIFF.
- Next, bring up the ortho view of the area you want. Make sure to zoom in quite a bit to get the higher resolution.
- In the lower-right corner, click on the export icon and select Export Entire Image.
- Now bring the GeoTIFF into ArcGIS Desktop. Here I have the new 2017 ortho displayed on top of the 2014 ortho.
- Your image might look a little choppy. To fix that, open the layer properties, select the Display tab, and change the “Resample during display” setting to “Bilinear Interpolation”. The “Nearest Neighbor” setting will make your image too choppy looking. Bilinear does a great job smoothing it out.
The GeoTIFF images are actually using geographic coordinates (WGS84), but they reproject very well into State Plane.
This is a very quick way to bring in the new 2017 Early Access imagery into your maps if you need to. As the imagery is cleaned up and worked on to create preliminary images, there will be map services setup for you to consume in your applications. But for now, you can use these steps. Enjoy! -mike
