Creating a map cache without ArcServer?

Question

Is there a way to create a tiled map cache without using ArcServer? I have aerial photography in .sid format that takes a while to load, whereas cached jpeg tiles will load much much faster. Any way I can work around this issue?

Answer 1

in tiling world there are some ways for caching tiles. in my application i am using gdal which is an excellent tool for both conversion and tiling. with sid files you can translate it to tif and then with gdal2tiles.py will help you to tile your data....

some example codes:

gdal_translate -of GTiff -co "TILED=YES" some.sid some.tif
gdal2tiles -title "Sid Photo" -z '0-12' some.tif sidFolder

usage of gdal2tiles.py

gdal2tiles.py [-title "Title"] [-publishurl http://yourserver/dir/]
          [-nogooglemaps] [-noopenlayers] [-nokml]
          [-googlemapskey KEY] [-forcekml] [-v]
          input_file [output_dir]

if your gdal not support sid file (you can learn with : gdalinfo --formats | grep -i mrsid ) you should add MrSID support into GDAL...

Adding mrsid support read this file : How to add MrSID support into GDAL

for tiling you can look SafeFME, Global Mapper too...

i hope it helps you