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I have about 200 ECW files of recently acquired 1-foot resolution aerial photos. Its about 15GB worth, covering over 250 sq. miles. Unfortunately, you need a license from ER Mapper that runs about $10K to publish ECWs in ArcGIS Server. I brought them all into GlobalMapper, mosaiced them, and pushed out a jpeg2000 that is about 31GB in size. It actually draws quite well, looks gorgeous, and is pretty snappy. Anyone have any other suggestions on how to deal with imagery datasets of this size (and by size I mean both areal extent and filesize)?

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Do you have SDE? Or Image Server? – Michael Todd Oct 15 '10 at 20:07
Just for any1 else, as Chad states, to server up ECWs in an ESRI Server product, you will need to get the relevant license from ERDAS: resources.arcgis.com/content/kbase?fa=articleShow&d=36261 resources.arcgis.com/content/kbase?fa=articleShow&d=32824 – Simon Oct 16 '10 at 12:17
@Michael Todd: We have SDE, but not Image Server. Also 9.3.1, not 10 – Chad Cooper Oct 19 '10 at 19:06
Just curious if you tried copying the three dlls in the article Simon Jackson cites? They are in your Desktop10.0 directory - just copy them to your Server10.0 diretory. I got ECWs to work like that. (Don't copy them from the ERDAS installs, they are not the same version). – brenth Apr 11 '11 at 20:49

3 Answers

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Now that you have the data in JP2, simply create a cached map service of the data within ArcGIS?

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We don't use cached map services because our users cannot stand being limited to only being able to zoom in to the lowest zoom level the cache allows. – Chad Cooper Oct 18 '10 at 15:52
Hopw are you serving up your services? To ArcGIS Desktop or web apps? Serving up imagery (without Image Server) as dynamic services in AGS is going to put a lot of load on your server, and potentially long rendering times for your end-users. With web apps, you can get around this problem, by mashing up both a cached map, and then when they hit the larger scale threshold, you have a dynamic map service kick in with scale dependency to only show it for the larger scales. – Simon Oct 18 '10 at 22:51
ultimately this worked to create a cached service for desktop users. we were getting server context errors but using the jpg2k took care of that. – Chad Cooper Oct 20 '10 at 1:35
up vote 1 down vote

I've just heard that ERDAS is about to launch a low cost AGS plugin (verified here). The rep was pretty clear its going to be no where near the $10k previous price so I'm rather intrigued.

It will be interesting to see how it performs in v10. Last time i looked into it, ECW was at least 3x faster than the same JP2 in AGS 9.3 so I'm hoping that means I won't need to cache at all

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I think it would depend on what the intended use of this imagery is (Tiled Layer Service, Image Layer Service...etc)

If you are looking to create a ArcGIS Server Tiled Service Layer, you can define "Gridding" parameters during the export from Global Mapper. So, load the ECW(s) into Global Mapper, and export tiles to jpeg 2000. Once a cache is created for these tiles, any respectable client should see good performance with such a service.

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