Best workflow for publishing a large aerial image.

[GregCarlino2]

What is the most efficient way to publish a very large aerial photo to an Enterprise Portal? 

I am currently trying to publish a 60+GB tif. aerial image as a Map Image (as I do not yet have an Image Server set up).  I would ideally like to publish a map cache for it, but it looks like the Create Map Server Cache tool requires an existing Map Service as a parameter in order to create the cache...   so I'd have to have it published as a Map Image as a prerequisite to building the cache.  So far, publishing the Map Image just keeps failing about 4 hours into the process.  This extremely long run-time is making it practically impossible to troubleshoot.

Is there a better workflow to accomplish this?

Thanks,

Greg

Specs:

Enterprise 10.9.1 - with a single ArcServer instance (no Image Server).

ArcGIS Pro 3.0

61GB tif aerial image.

[ZachBodenner]

I have a similar thing I need to do once a year. I actually just publish mine as a map service. At one time in the past I specified cache settings (scales, etc) and now when I publish my once-a-year aerial, I use the previous year's cache settings to pre-load into the new map service.

[TonyContreras_Frisco_TX · Accepted solution]

Creating the Map service is your first step, then set up the cache and generate the tiles. When publishing your service, make sure the setting to copy the data to the server is not enabled. This will require setting up the image file location as a Data Store on the Server Site and making sure that the account running ArcGIS Server has read access to the directory.

[GregCarlino2]

Thank you, Tony!  The 'copy data to the server' setting was the problem.  After disabling that and making sure the account had access, the aerial published quite quickly.  Building the map cache afterward took several hours but complete, but did so without a hitch.  Much appreciated!