SID mosaics or individual TIFFs in a mosaic dataset?

Question

I have a new raster dataset for my whole county - roughly 2,000 square miles.  It was provided with two copies of the data:

* Individual tiffs, over a thousand individual files
* 'Sub-Mosaics' as SID files, approx 50 individual files* These are sub areas of the county, not the whole county in one mosaic

I want to provide the imagery as a basemap option in our instance of Enterprise (10.9.1) and am wondering if it is better to add TIFF tiles or the SID mosaics to the mosaic dataset.

All the imagery is RGB, 8 bit, natural color - just a whole bunch of high-quality aerial images that I need to provide as a seamless layer, in the most efficient way possible.

JimCarmichael1 · Answer

This is old, but what did you end up deciding to do and why? I am in the same type of situation trying to determine pros and cons of SID vs TIFF

evtguy · Answer

I don't know if this has changed (and don't know if this would be an issue if the imagery is served up through enterprise) but the one thing about SIDs is that when you wanted to print using a SID, the SID image had to be "unpacked" before it could be sent to the printer. The end result is that it took much longer to print from a SID source rather than a TIF or other image format.