How to identify image footprints of an aerial photograph

Question

I need a tool that will take aerial images with Lat, Long, and Alt in their EXIF data and produce foot prints of the images. We need to verify that the images cover the photographed area with proper overlap.

Answer 1

Using ArcGIS 10.1 [Standard & Advanced license only]

Build Footprints (Data Management) "Computes the footprints for each raster dataset in a mosaic dataset."

If there is a selection, only those selected footprints will be recalculated.

The footprint is used to calculate the boundary. If you modify the shape of the footprints along the perimeter of the mosaic dataset, you need to recalculate the boundary. If you don't choose to use this tool, then you can do it later using the Build Boundary tool.

You cannot rebuild footprints for a referenced mosaic dataset.

The Approximate Number of Vertices parameter is used to define the complexity of the footprints. The higher the number of vertices will mean the footprint is more accurate and more irregular. Valid values range from 4 to 10,000. You can set your value to be -1, so that no generalization will take place, but this may mean your footprint will have a very large number of vertices.

This tool does not support the environment settings.

http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/index.html#//001700000087000000

Source: http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/index.html#//009t0000003v000000

Answer 2

Here is a step by step guide to process images with EXIF data into a set of coordinates in a csv file, which can then be imported into a GIS.

There is also a plugin for Quantum called photo2shape which performs the same steps as the above guide, but outputs as a shapefile and is a more hands-off process.