Maintain the full metadata (title, item description, etc) for individual rasters within the mosaic data-set once the mosaic is published to the server

Question

I am having trouble finding a definitive answer to this question.  For mosaic rasters published to the server, I am looking to allow users to download individual rasters from a mosaic dataset.  The problem is once the individual raster is published then downloaded the metadata (title, item description, tags, etc) for this individual raster - not the mosaic dataset metadata - is blank.

The Raster Tile Cache tool seems promising but I have not been able to get it to work for this specific problem. The mosaic dataset properties for metadata_level is also set to "Full".

Thanks!

Brad

EDITS: See my comment below on a few potential solutions

Anonymous User · Answer

Hope this helps someone out down the line... To maintain the item description metadata (not the raster metadata), I ultimately ended up storing this information in the blob field.  It isn't too difficult to learn how to do this.

A good resource(s) to learn how to do this is here:

Another GIS Blog: Working with BLOB data at 10.1 (arcpy.da)

Iterate through rasters in a mosaic

Also potentially helpful, but did not personally use.

GitHub - Esri/mdcs-py: MDCS is an acronym for Mosaic Dataset Configuration Script and is the entry point to a collection…

Anonymous User · Answer

Peter, thanks for the quick response! I am still getting acquainted with imagery data and metadata.  The ArcGIS Auxillary Files resource indicates that these files include many types of information but doesn't mention the Item Description metadata:

I've attempted to generate the aux.xml file but all it includes is other metadata information (statistics, coordinate system, etc.), not the information I intend to carry over. Also, the original item description metadata (image clarification above) in FGDC format would ideally be downloaded by the user from the web-based GIS.

It seems that there are ways to add the item description metadata to the aux.xml via GDAL RAM, but the item description metadata in FGDC format will not be maintained. The images are in various formats and GDAL RAM only seems to support GeoTIFFs.  Does it support other image formats too (for example .img)?

PeterBecker · Answer

MetaData for the rasters should be stored as auxiliary files to the individual rasters. There a multiple standards that can be used to store such image metadata. One method is to use store the data in the .AUX.XML stored next to the raster. This is sometimes referred to as GDAL PAM). When the mosaic dataset is created the metadata will be extracted as attributes if fields with the same name exist in the mosaic dataset. These metadata attributes are then available for search, sorting etc in the mosaic dataset. If published and downloaded the Aux.xml (and some other associated metadata files) for the image will also be downloaded and so available. Note this does not work for Export which clips and returns the pixels for a specific AOI and can be the results of mosaicking of multiple images.