topic Re: Crop Raster Tool After Georeferencing in ArcGIS Pro Questions

Crop Raster Tool After Georeferencing

akj39 — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 17:56:32 GMT

Hello all,

I am currently a student at the University of West Florida working toward my GIS certification, and I am a GIS intern at a local county property appraiser's office.

A previous student intern at the office had begun a project georeferencing scanned historical mylar aerial images, and I am taking over where he left off.

The images all have a white border with information about that individual shot. The team would like to eventually crop these images to have them function as a mosaic. I am trying to figure out if it is possible to crop the rasters that have already been georeferenced.

I have tried using the Clip Raster tool and drawing my clipping extent. This works great on the images BEFORE they have been through the georeferencing process. However, when I use the tool on rasters that have already been georeferenced, the output still has some of the white border, even outside of the temporary polygon bounding box used for the clipping extent.

I thought I had a screenshot of the output, but it is on my work computer. I'll be able to include a screenshot tomorrow if necessary. I am including a screenshot of one of the images before georeferencing, just so you're able to visualize the border I'm attempting to remove. I'm hoping you all can give me some insight on how to make this work.

Thank you!

Austin

Re: Crop Raster Tool After Georeferencing

DavidPike — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 20:09:23 GMT

Hi, you'll likely find a Mosaic Dataset the best way to store these rasters. An especially useful aspect (of many) is that you can define Footprints to crop the rasters at the display level rather than having to crop/resample the raster source images.

The footprints are essentially bounding polygons where everything inside is displayed. Anything outside a footprint (for the raster it is associated with) is not displayed. You may have seen these footprints before as green (usually the default) rectangles.

The last of the 2 links below detail how to either set a clip extent (for footprints) via pixel ranges or to calculate radiometrically. Yoiu can also manually edit the footprints just like features.
Mosaic datasets—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation
Create and use a mosaic dataset | Documentation
Mosaic dataset footprints—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation
Define Mosaic Dataset NoData (Data Management)—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation
Radiometric footprint recalculation—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation

Re: Crop Raster Tool After Georeferencing

akj39 — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 21:24:57 GMT

Excellent @DavidPike. Thank you so much!

I'm excited to head back into the office and experiment with this!

Much appreciated.