topic Re: Collector for Android - SD Card Support for .tpk in ArcGIS Collector Questions

Collector for Android - SD Card Support for .tpk

KirkDavis1 — Mon, 23 Mar 2015 19:16:41 GMT

Hello all,

I have researched into this topic, but have not found an updated answer. Has ESRI Collector for Android decided to support tile package (.tpk) storage on SD cards? I understand that there were performance issues with SD cards during testing. I would like to know if anyone has experimented with this or if Collector plans on including this feature in future iterations? I need to make a disclaimer that I have not tested saving .tpk files in an SD card - I wanted to check here first.

Thanks,

Kirk

Re: Collector for Android - SD Card Support for .tpk

PeteCrosier — Tue, 24 Mar 2015 10:50:09 GMT

I haven't seen anything for a while, currently only internal storage is supported officially.

You could work around it by mounting your SD card and setting a symlink..

https://community.esri.com/message/453313#453313

.. but obviously this is unsupported by Esri.

Re: Collector for Android - SD Card Support for .tpk

KirkDavis1 — Wed, 25 Mar 2015 17:45:55 GMT

Thank you for your response. This is exactly what I was envisioning as a work around. If SD cards were supported by the application, I imagine someone from ESRI immediately answering my question. I'm going to implement the root, mount, symlink workaround.

Re: Collector for Android - SD Card Support for .tpk

AdamOlson — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 19:48:43 GMT

I don't know why you need a work around?

I am using TPK's from the SD Card, copied into the Collector folder

Re: Collector for Android - SD Card Support for .tpk

KirkDavis1 — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 21:11:09 GMT

I was looking to the SD card for direct storage of the large .tpk files. For example, my Samsung Galaxy Tablet has 16GB of onboard memory (of which 11GB is available) which is where the Collector folder is stored. I created a tile package which is 25GB and want to get it onto the tablet (I need 14GB more of space, which I don't have). Storing .tpk files on the SD card is the only way to do this. The root-mount-symlink is the only way to have the Collector app read and process the tile package - unless ESRI develops SD card compatibility. Do you see why I need that workaround?

Re: Collector for Android - SD Card Support for .tpk

AdamOlson — Mon, 06 Apr 2015 18:30:17 GMT

Your saying ESRI doesn't support SD card compatibility? However I am using tpk put on my micro sd card in my android phones.

The problem is that the format of the sd card is fat32 which has a 4 gb limit. I have tpk's that are around 8 GB and I can't copy those to my 32 GB micro SD card.

ESRI isn't the problem with supporting it, its the SD card format limit. I tried reformating to exFat and NTFS but my phone won't read the card then.

I have done lots of google searching and reading for about 8 hours on trying to get around that limit and I don't see anyway to do it.

Re: Collector for Android - SD Card Support for .tpk

KirkDavis1 — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 19:32:59 GMT

Adam,

how are you able to get your <4gb in size .tpk files read from the SD card? I tried to mimic what you said, I haven't tried the "root-symlink-workaround" yet, it hasn't quite worked. Is there any hope for having he .tpk files read from the SD card - hope I'm not asking you the same question.

Re: Collector for Android - SD Card Support for .tpk

PeteCrosier — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 20:38:38 GMT

Maybe the confusion is coming from Android - it will often call internal phone storage "SD card" and your actual SD card "external SD card", or something similar. Tile packages must be put into the "ArcGIS_Collector" folder and this folder will be on your internal storage, this folder isn't on your actual SD card and Collector will not look on your actual SD card for tile packages. If it does work for Adam then I guess he has a very weird setup or he's done the (currently) impossible?

Re: Collector for Android - SD Card Support for .tpk

AdamOlson — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 16:52:06 GMT

Apparently I have done the impossible

On my android device, I have an ArcGIS_Collector folder on the internal storage and on the "actual" MicroSD card.

Take your TPK's and place it into the ArcGIS_Collector on the SD card. Below you see my SD card from within Windows explorer.

After you use Collector those tpks disappear and are extracted into the basemaps folder by collector.

And below you can see I have the Arc_Collector Folder on the internal and external card.

Turn phone off, then put the microSD card in. Turn phone on, open collector. Choose map to download. Now look at my options for basemaps that show up on my device.

The TPK's were moved to the basemaps folder on the EXTERNAL micro sd card, not the internal phone storage.

Re: Collector for Android - SD Card Support for .tpk

VenusScott — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 16:58:46 GMT

Awesome!

Re: Collector for Android - SD Card Support for .tpk

PeteCrosier — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 18:02:34 GMT

Thanks, guess I'll carve out some time on Monday to have a go at this!

Re: Collector for Android - SD Card Support for .tpk

SIGSERPE84 — Fri, 03 Jul 2015 08:08:48 GMT

We have followed each steps and it didn't work on our Samsung Galaxy Tab 4.

The format of our SD card is FAT32.

Did Adam's solution work for anyone else ?

Re: Collector for Android - SD Card Support for .tpk

AdamOlson — Fri, 13 Nov 2015 17:43:27 GMT

I am thinking that devices may need to be rooted to work. Because the devices it works on for me ARE rooted and the devices that it does not work are NOT rooted.

I will root a device its not working on and report back.

Re: Collector for Android - SD Card Support for .tpk

DougBrowning — Fri, 13 Nov 2015 20:09:05 GMT

We are using a Android app by a vendor that uses TPK files on a SD card allowing us to take very large areas offline (3 million+ acres down to L16). We have no performance issues at all running 30+GB of caches/TPKs - 12+ unzipped caches and 80+ TPK files. Some tpks are 600+MB and still no issue. We also can put any shp files we want on.

We do unzip that larger TPKs for the imagery (3+gb) since it can get slow but other than that it is as fast as we can pan on Tab 4 and newer. I ran a high res test last week and was running a 16GB imagery cache no problem. We have had it running for over 2 years on tablets as old as Samsung Tab 2s. We go buy the faster SD cards.

I did a lot of performance testing on internal and SDcards for our app. I found the speed to be the same on a SD card if not faster (maybe because the app is local splitting the load). So I am always very surprised when I hear Esri say this. It has been our main reason for not using collector.

I wish they would open it up and let us at least try it.

Re: Collector for Android - SD Card Support for .tpk

JoeCeradini — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 15:45:25 GMT

I am also having trouble storing tpk files on an external SD card and using them as base maps in Arc Collector. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

I have a NVIDIA shield K1 tablet (Lollipop version), which is rooted. I have tried many approaches for moving/linking collector to the SD but none have worked, such as Link2SD, Apps2SD, FolderMount, and File Commander. I have also tried these apps with and without the SD card partitioned. The apps say that Collector has been moved or linked, and certain Collector data files are on the SD, but I still cannot store tpk’s on the SD and get Collector to find them.

A Collector folder always shows up on the internal storage even after it has supposedly been moved. If I put a tpk in the Collector folder on internal memory, the tpk is stored on internal, and Collector converts it to a base map (this is great for smaller files, but I quickly run out of internal memory). If I try the approach outlined by batpro99 in this thread (I copied the Collector folder to the external SD via File Commander), the tpk is stored on the external memory but Collector cannot find it.

Any suggestions? Is there a better way to copy/move/link the Collector folder from internal to external memory and still get Collector to recognize the files in the external location?

- Joe

Re: Collector for Android - SD Card Support for .tpk

Natalie_MRunyan1 — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 23:36:25 GMT

Does anyone know if this limitation still exists? I'm not finding it in the list of current features, and I find lots of talk about offline basemaps but nothing about using on external SD.

Re: Collector for Android - SD Card Support for .tpk

Kylie — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 23:40:49 GMT

SD cards are supported in devices running a version of Android earlier than 4.4. See FAQs—Collector for ArcGIS | ArcGIS

Update: With the 17.0.1 release in June 2017, using an SD card is supported on all verisons of Android.

Re: Collector for Android - SD Card Support for .tpk

Natalie_MRunyan1 — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 23:43:31 GMT

woohoo! But, wait, EARLIER than 4.4, so this is a feature that will not be supported going forward?! My phone is >2 years old and I'm on Android 6.0... are there even any devices still using Android < 4.4

Re: Collector for Android - SD Card Support for .tpk

Kylie — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 23:56:57 GMT

It is on the roadmap to add it to later versions as well.

Re: Collector for Android - SD Card Support for .tpk

DougBrowning — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 16:35:12 GMT

Can you please make sure we can set the specific directory as well. Not forced to a directory named Collector or anything like that. This is so I can point both my apps to the same location. I do this for Survey123 now and it works great. (BTW Survey123 has let me pick any dir for tpks for some time now - look at how they did it.)

All our tablets are Android 6 now so I guess we have to wait. For our app we had to program in a way to pick the actual dir to use since in v6 the card is named by the serial number. So for example /storage/3876-5345/dir/tpks There is no way to know the card name in advance. But in the end it was nice to have it so flexible. Please just give us a dir pick box to set the location.

Also please make sure it can read ALL tpks in the spot even if they are buried in subdirs. That way I can organize them better and use my current app structure.

One last idea. Allow the tpks to be unzipped as well. We have found that this really speeds up larger caches - like for imagery. As listed in my previous post I have over 100 tpks on my tablets now - some up to 9 GB. Have been using them for 3 years now and learned a lot about them. SD Card has always worked great. I have noticed that SD Cards rated at 80 MB/S or higher work the best in newer tablets.

As far as the TPKs themselves I still have 5 open bugs on the building tools (Create Map package, Export tile cache, etc) that have been open for 2 years now - even after being escalated. Getting these to work right is critical.

Thanks a lot!