It took me a while to figure this out, but I finally got tiles cached for our Nearmap imagery that was delivered as TIFFs. This is my first time doing this whole process in ArcGIS Pro, so I’m hoping I’m just missing something obvious.
What I did:
Created a raster dataset in a file geodatabase (FGDB) (accepted all default values)
Loaded ~100 Nearmap TIFFs (4-inch resolution) into the raster dataset(accepted all default values)
The load process took about 1 day and 14 hours to complete
In previous years, I loaded Nearmap imagery into an enterprise geodatabase (EGDB), so this FGDB-based workflow is new for me. We also do not have Image Server, so this imagery will ultimately be used for cached tiles rather than published as an image service.The last time I cached tiles for imagery was in 2017 using ArcMap.
Now that everything is loaded, I’m noticing the imagery looks much more pixelated and not nearly as clear as the original TIFFs. When I view the TIFFs directly, they look great, but once they’re in the raster dataset the quality drops noticeably.
Although imagery processing isn’t really my forte, I have been responsible for caching tiles for the last ~15 years and the default values have always worked!—this is just my first time using Pro for this workflow.
Before I move forward with caching the tiles:
Is there anything I should be checking or changing to preserve image clarity?
Are there specific raster dataset settings, pyramids, resampling methods, pixel type, or compression options I should revisit?
Could the difference between FGDB vs EGDB be contributing to what I’m seeing?
Would a mosaic dataset have been a better choice for this type of 4-inch Nearmap imagery, given that we don’t have Image Server?
Any recommendations would be appreciated. I’d rather fix this now than cache tiles that don’t look great.
