Exporting bounding area only via ArcGIS Pro?

Question

I use ArcGIS Pro to export a layout as jpg format image.

I just wonder if any tools in ArcGIS pro can help me export the polygon area only and remove or symbolize the rest area as grey?

My quick thought is that it may not directly operate on the basemap because so far I didn’t find any easy tool to either symbolize the out-of-bound area into grey or other style to distinguish it from the bounding area.

I guess if I need to copy the map view into an imagery first and then dealing with it as an image file and crop it further.

Answer 1

I thought that I had seen a new feature in ArcGIS Pro 2.3 to be able to designate a polygon feature to act as a graphic clip on a map frame.

However, when I looked just now I found that it was not there.

What you can do is to digitize a polygon to act as a graphic clip on a map frame and this is described in the Modify a map frame help:

On the Insert tab, in the Map Frames group, click the Reshape drop-down menu, choose a draw tool, and then draw a new shape on your existing map frame.

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I have looked some more and found that you can use a polygon feature to graphically click a Map (not a Map Frame) as long as you are using ArcGIS Pro 2.3.0 or later.

To test this I:

1. Created a test project using the Map template
2. Added a feature class (AfricanCountries) with polygons for each country in Africa (and turned it off so that I could see the Topographic basemap underneath
3. Opened the Properties of the Map to its Clip Layers tab
4. Changed No clipping to Clip to the outline of features
5. Chose to Get shape from the outline of: AfricanCountries by double-clicking it, them clicked Apply and OK
6. On the Share tab of the Ribbon I chose Export Map
7. Set Save as type: JPEG and clicked Export

This is the result:

To export from a Layout instead just insert this graphically clipped Map into a Map Frame.