How to host images in Portal for ArcGIS and link them as attachment in feature layer

[lmatteo]

Hello,

I'm looking for the best way to host images and link to them from a feature layer.

Until now, I had feature layers where one entity had one image attached. However, I now have a feature layer where multiple entities should have the same image attached. I do not want to add the same image 1000 times to the layer if 1000 entities require it.

I've seen in other organizations that they host their images in their portal or ArcGIS sites and access the images via a link like this: https://url-of-organisation/images/FOLDER/sub-folder/{photo}, where {photo} is the photo name in a specific field in the layer.

How can I create this kind of storage?

1. In Portal for ArcGIS, I cannot create subfolders to host the images.
2. In Portal for ArcGIS, I cannot host multiple images at the same time (I have almost 1000 images to host).
3. In Portal for ArcGIS, I cannot link to an image by its name, only by its ID.

Is that mandatory to use an ArcGIS Image Server to achieve that ? Each photo is about 500ko, so we wanted to know if there is another way to achiev that without creating an ArcGIS Image Server.

Thank you for your help.

Best regards,

[jcarlson]

There are a couple of ways to do this. If you're running Portal, then you have a Web Adaptor. Whatever machine is running Web Adaptor, you should be able to find the root web directory. If you're on Windows, look for the folder wwwroot. That corresponds to https://url-of-org, and you can create the /images directory there.

Adding images to that folder can be tedious if you don't have easy access to the machine running your Portal's Web Adaptor, but you might be able to set up an FTP link to that folder for easier uploading. This is a good, simple solution, and you have full control over the URL path and filenames, making it easy to dynamically create URLs from feature attributes.

An in-portal option is to upload the photos as individual items in your Content page. Each photo would need to be shared publicly, and then a public URL is created for each. You'd need to copy that link to the feature attributes in some way. This can be extremely tedious, and I don't recommend it.

Another option is to host your images somewhere else, like a public S3 bucket on AWS. These can be registered to a subdomain easily enough, something like images.your-org-url, and they tend to be a bit easier to upload images to. They also won't eat up space on your Portal machine, if that ever becomes a concern.

[lmatteo]

Hi Josh,

Regarding the in-portal option, it's unfortunate that there is no possibility to access an item with a public URL using the item name instead of the item ID.

I will try the first option, as it seems to be the simplest solution.

Thank you for your help.

Best regards,

[lmatteo]

Hi Josh,

We investigated your first suggestion. Unfortunately, we couldn't find the wwwroot folder on the machine running the Web Adaptor.

We do have another server with IIS services such as Microsoft Exchange, where we found the folder (inetpub\wwwroot). Is there something specific we need to activate to have this folder available for the Web Adaptor?

We have a folder that seems to correspond to the Portal Web Adaptor, but there is no wwwroot folder or anything similar.

Edit : The WebAdaptor was installed through the Java Platform and not IIS. Thus, it's explain we do not found this folder.

Thank you for your assistance.

Best regards,

[lmatteo · Accepted solution]

After further investigation on the web server machine, we found the directory where we can place images that are visible from the portal URL.

Here is the path to the directory with the Web Adaptor installed through the Java Platform:
C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 8.5\webapps\portal\images

And the corresponding link to the portal :
https://portal-url/portal/images/