Best practices for sharing large rasters/mosaic datasets?

Question

We currently have an enterprise database that contains nothing but old raster data. This setup predates my time here but I've kept it going because I haven't had a compelling reason to change it. The mosaic datasets are pretty large (most are over 1k high resolution images).

I'm examining our current practices and looking for potential ways to increase efficiency and this got me to wondering if there is a reason to have it in an eGDB at all? Is there a performance impact on keeping those rasters in an eGDB? The rasters are never edited aside from when they are created. So I'm not sure what benefit there is to it being in an eGDB vs. a regular file geodatabase.

Compounding on that, I'm wondering if it wouldn't be a good idea to explore the option of using a tiled service to share the imagery out to the organization.

How are you guys handling your large raster datasets these days?

George_Thompson · Answer

Here is a great site that provides some guidance on these topics: https://doc.arcgis.com/en/imagery/workflows/

ZachBodenner · Answer

I'll jump on to say I'm interested in hearing from more experienced folks as well - we host one aerial image on our server that we replace every year. Right now, we've been storing it in an fGDB on the hosting server and publishing it as a map server. It's kind of a hefty process, and though publishing aerials as map services has gone fine from ArcMap, I've actually been completely unsuccessful with Pro.

AndyIngall · Answer

That's a great question.  I am in the same situation, having loads of tif's and raster datasets stored all over the place, and again all before my time.  I am trying to bring them all together, but have been trying to find the best practice for storing this data, also not sure as to where to move all the data to, and whether i am going to need to point to it later on, or it can all get copied and consumed via portal...

All ideas welcome...