Turning off overlay generation for mosaic tool

[JFPrieur]

How does one turn off overlay generation when using the Mosaic(Data Management) tool?. I can turn off pyramids and statistics in the environments settings but .ovr files keep getting generated (even for the temporary *.tif files created during the process) which really slows things down.

Must be obvious, I just can't find it!

Thank you in advance.

[DanPatterson_Retired]

good questions... they are automatically generated OVR pyramid files—Help | ArcGIS for Desktop

but you might want to check here Advanced ArcMap Settings utility—Help | ArcGIS for Desktop where most stuff that can't be controlled in arcmap resides.

[JFPrieur]

Thank you for the quick reply, I looked in the document, there is no setting that controls this in there either. But I learnt something new, did not know about this utility!

It is annoying when making large mosaics since the temporary files get larger and larger and overlays are generated for both.

This is on ArcGIS 10.3.1, did not include that in OP.

[CodyBenkelman]

Under environment settings, raster storage.  Default is "build pyramids" enabled, but you can turn it off

...but as an alternative, have you looked at using Mosaic Datasets instead of taking the time and disk space to write mosaics to disk?  I have not used the Mosaic tool in 5 years.

[JFPrieur]

Even when you turn pyramids off in the settings (which I mention doing in my post) it still creates overlays .ovr files.

And I am making huge .tif files from lidar data so no, I do not think Mosaic Datasets are helpful in my case.

[CodyBenkelman]

My apologies, I read over your post too quickly - missed your note about turning pyramids off in Environment settings.  I'll have to check but that sounds like a bug - you should not be getting *.ovr pyramids if that setting is off. 

As for lidar & using Mosaic Datasets, if you are sending the elevation tiff file to other software, you may not have this option, but if you're staying within ArcGIS or sharing via image services,  our recommended best practice for DTMs and DSMs from lidar is

• use LAS Dataset to Tiled Rasters to create multiple tiles,
• use Mosaic Dataset to create a virtual raster

Details are here http://esriurl.com/LidarGuidebook (and note the GP tool I mention is not built into core - you have to download from 3D team here: http://links.esri.com/3dSamples  )

[JFPrieur]

Thank you for the information, yes this is a very specific use case scenario where I will aggregate 25cm resolution lidar canopy height models to 5 or 10m. But the raster tiles containg the 25cm data do not overlap, so I can not aggregate each tile first and then mosaic, which would be much quicker (even with the apparent .ovr issue in my original post).

I usually do not make these huge raster mosaics, I calculate metrics and perform random forest classifications on the point clouds using Python and R and use LAS datasets quite often to make DSM and DTM (tiled). Works very well for our purposes usually.

Thanks again for the info and I can provide further info if you need a bug report.