Best Practices for Creating and Publishing Large Orthophoto Basemaps in ArcGIS Enterprise

Question

Hello everyone! 
I have approximately 34,000 orthophotos, and I need to create a basemap, meaning I’ll have to publish a service that’s accessible and usable by many users. Could you please advise me on how to best optimize these images and what you would recommend for publishing them in ArcGIS Enterprise?
I’ve reviewed various documentation and I’m considering adding the orthophotos to a Mosaic Dataset, then publishing the service by defining the various levels of detail and subsequently creating raster tiles and building the cache directly on the server.
Does this approach sound correct, or are there any additional optimizations I should consider beforehand?Thank you!

Mariano

RTPL_AU · Answer

@DanPatterson , anyone else  - do you know of a resource similar to the old System Design pages in the now missing wiki.gis.com?
It had a range of metrics and tests to model performance based on data type, user numbers, server type, etc.

As far as I can tell instead of donating the content to an open initiative because it got too hard to keep up to date, it just got wiped and the url is directed to esri. com/en-us/what-is-gis/resources
I really want to be wrong about this assumption.

@MarianoDiNapoli

Look up wiki.gis.com on the wayback machine and go to the System Design Strategies section. Although out of date, the concepts are invaluable. (Last version was from around April 2024 but go to 2022 or 2021 for more links to work).

Some of the key considerations are the base image format storage (tiffs on a SMB share vs as blobs in SQL vs ArcGIS rasters in GDB), pyramids or overviews and their storage,  sharing the 'live' mosaic as a service vs creating static tile packages, number of active concurrent users, server infrastructure, cost of storage, backup considerations (using large tile packs and changing them often while keeping older versions for temporal / compliance reasons can nuke the IT backup strategy 🤣  "We want to publish imagery to our users. How much storage do you need? Yes." )

MarianoDiNapoli · Answer

Hi Dan,
Thank you very much for your quick reply.
However, I’m still not sure if there are any recommendations in the documentation on how to optimize orthophotos within a Mosaic Dataset. Are there any additional optimizations that should be performed before publishing — for example, creating overviews?
I’ve seen and read that most people agree on generating Raster Tiles, but I’d like to confirm this with you.
Thanks again,

Mariano

DanPatterson · Answer

related Best practice for publishing orthophoto - Esri Community