Making orthophoto mosaic layers in ArcPRO with historic air photos

Question

I have 168,000+ air photos of Colorado dating from the 1930s to early 2000s.  I would love to scan various sets of these photos & mash them into 1 orthophoto layer per set (so a single layer containing the 1938 set of photos of my area). I work in ArcPRO for desktop.  I have found a few tutorials but they don't seem to fit my situation.  Most tutorials deal with more modern data taken by satellites or by airplanes and have a large amount of associated metadata.  The only information I have about most photos are the center points, approximate footprints of each photo (these were determined examining the center points & the physical photos and created in large batches so their accuracy is an approximation), date, scale, direction of flight (usually N-S or S-N but not always and older ones tend to wander), numbering schema (project, roll, frame).  I lack information about the cameras, lenses, etc. and it is highly unlikely that I will find that data. * How can I rapidly create these photo mosaic layers?
* What automated system/script can I use to georectify my photos?
* Beyond the scans of the photos, what other information do I need to get started on this project?

I would be happy to learn more about any similar projects you have been working on & the success and pitfalls you have encountered.
I realize this is a complex and time-consuming process but I am very willing to put in the time to learn how to do this. Many thanks in advance,Chris ThiryMap & GIS LibrarianColorado School of Mines

DEAF_PROBERT_68 · Answer

My co-worker tried  to use Ortho-mapping with the old aerial photos and did not give a good postive results.

Just saying ... I don't know if there are others that have tried this method.

BobBooth1 · Answer

It might be possible to use the Ortho mapping workflow in ArcGIS Pro.

Ortho mapping in ArcGIS Pro—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation

Create an ortho mapping workspace for scanned aerial imagery—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation

https://doc.arcgis.com/en/imagery/workflows/tutorials/create-historical-imagery-products-ortho-mapping.htm

Given a table of the center point coordinates and image IDs, you could create a point feature class of center point features.

Given corner coordinates and image IDs for the bounding boxes, you could create sets of points and make polygons from them. These could be useful for hasty/simple affine transformation georeferencing of the images.

One thing that might be semi-automatable would be to manually georeference the first one in a series, and then export the referencing information as a World File. World files are simple text files that match the image file name and are stored in the same folder, and they have a file extension of the image file type + w.

This is the Export Raster World File tool doc:

https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/tool-reference/data-management/export-raster-world-file.htm

Here is a help topic on World Files:

https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/help/data/imagery/world-files-for-raster-datasets.htm

You can open a World File in a text editor and view its content.

So, the point of manually georeferencing and then exporting the world file is, you might be able to work out the relationship between each image and its corner coordinates values as represented in the bounding box feature coordinates.

Once you have that, you could use Python to read through the set of bounding boxes and write out a corresponding set of world files for the images. That might give you a leg up on the Ortho mapping workspace process.

Here is an old thread with some sample code:

https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/140502/trying-to-build-world-file-for-images-based-off-extent-rectangle-generated-from

BillFox · Answer

maybe begin registering and rectifying to reference the usgs quad sheets