topic Re: What filetype is the most stable for georeferencing in Pro? in ArcGIS Pro Questions

What filetype is the most stable for georeferencing in Pro?

Bud — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 14:32:11 GMT

ArcGIS Pro 3.4.0

My experience is that georeferencing is buggy in Pro.

What file type is the most stable? TIFF? FGDB? Something else?

Re: What filetype is the most stable for georeferencing in Pro?

RichardHowe — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 07:42:25 GMT

PDFs definitely have some bugs in them. For the most part I have found jpgs to behave themselves though

What issues are you having?

Re: What filetype is the most stable for georeferencing in Pro?

Bud — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 07:41:13 GMT

Thanks @RichardHowe.

Issues (Pro 3.4.0):

An image I extracted from a PDF as a .TIFF using Adobe Acrobat only shows up as a white blob in Pro. I solved it by exporting the image to a JPEG in Microsoft Paint, and that worked better in Pro; I could see the image.
I georeferenced the JPEG and saved the georeferencing. But when I closed the georeferencing, the georeferencing information was lost -- the image was no longer georeferenced. I did the georeferencing again to the same image, saved, closed, and it worked that time.
Related: Georeferencing bugs in ArcGIS Pro
~~With the JPEG, I don't see the Primary Symbology > Classify option mentioned in Easily remove white pixels from georeferenced plan.~~
ArcGIS Pro crashed my computer spectacularly when using the georeferenced JPEG in a map. My computer 100% froze, including the mouse not even moving on the screen.
When I use the JPEG in my map, it only is visible for a short while, then the black pixels disappear after I've moved around in the map a bit. The white envelope/blob still remains. I need to turn the layer off and on again in order to see the black pixels in the image.
I can't seem to export the georeferenced JPEG to any other format properly, such as TIFF or FGDB. The resulting images are either a white blob or a black blob.

Now that Pro 3.4.2 has been released what issues do people still have that are not yet addressed?

Re: What filetype is the most stable for georeferencing in Pro?

RTPL_AU — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 01:48:24 GMT

Hi @Bud
For imagery & scans out of a pdf I use a simple open source pdf to jpg converter then clean & clip as needed. Some PDF tools try to be 'smart' and add junk to tiff output. Tiff is great when Esri/Erdas/etc make it but not something I go to in the same sentence as pdf.

When you convert said tiff to jpg (not sure what Paint does - I prefer IrfanView for basic raster/bmp handling) it may also incorporate some of the 'bad' metadata from the tiff hence issues. The breaking of georeferencing may be due to a resize in the convert process. More reasons exist.

I use png, jpg, jp2000, ecw, and tiff often and usually issues are created at the source and not in Pro; but Pro is less than graceful in handling these mal-formed datasets.... Sounds like an Idea.....

Depending on the size I store a lot of raster data in FGDB. Fantastic placebo performance in my setup and it is a native format that Pro should work with without fault; it's also without weird issues like sneeze deleting the georefence file (not that I don't have easy nearline snapshot backups, but if I don't have to spend 2min restoring a backup....).