I really liked how Denzel Washington used the phrase “explain this to me as if I were a xxx-year-old” in the movie Philadelphia (1993).
![](/legacyfs/online/291449_pastedImage_1.jpg)
Reference: Philadelphia. Philadelphia, PA: Jonathan Demme, 1993. film.
So, I will take it one step further and attempt to explain the concept of georeferencing to an actual five-year-old.
Five-year-old:
![](/legacyfs/online/273170_pastedImage_1.png)
Five-year-old engineer says, “I have this PDF of a site plan. I want to put this on a map and have it line up properly.”
![](/legacyfs/online/273171_pastedImage_2.png)
Here is my map.
![](/legacyfs/online/273172_pastedImage_3.png)
We need to zoom in a little bit closer.
![](/legacyfs/online/273173_pastedImage_4.png)
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A little bit more.
![](/legacyfs/online/273174_pastedImage_5.png)
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Almost there. Zoom in some more so that our site plan will fit better.
![](/legacyfs/online/273175_pastedImage_6.png)
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Much better. Now, we need to shrink the site plan to a more usable size. Currently, it’s larger than our map.
![](/legacyfs/online/273176_pastedImage_7.png)
Let’s make it a little bit smaller.
![](/legacyfs/online/273177_pastedImage_8.png)
Perfect. Now we need to place the site plan on our zoomed in map and adjust it to fit by rotating it and resizing it.
![](/legacyfs/online/273178_pastedImage_9.png)
Great! Now, after some quality control of adjustments and transformations, we can rectify this image and call it georeferenced!
![](/legacyfs/online/273179_pastedImage_10.png)
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We can make the georeferenced image transparent to where we can see the basemap behind it.
![](/legacyfs/online/273180_pastedImage_11.png)
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Finally, we can add existing linework and other GIS files to give the image a more solid reference.
![](/legacyfs/online/273181_pastedImage_12.png)
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Voila! ![](/legacyfs/online/emoticons/happy.png)
Please leave comments and let me know if this is helpful and/or what I should change with this blog post. Thanks for reading!