Moving Multiple Points Into Single Polygon using ArcGIS Desktop?

Question

I have several days worth of geotagged imagery to which I've attached a tree canopy mortality rating.

The goal is to eventually join all of these classifications to a shapefile that contains watershed catchments for a whole region.

The issue is that images were taken at an oblique angle, so the image location as reported by the camera may be different than the catchment with classified stands.

Determining which photos were in which catchment was done manually by using snapshot views in google earth. This was added to an excel file, from which XY coordinates were displayed. Each image has between 1-5 rows in the spreadsheet, each of which has following columns: Image Name, Catchment #, Easting, Northing, Elevation, and Mortality Classification. The same image may encompass up to 5 catchments, leading to the issue.

So far I've tried to select features by attributes to determine which photo points should be in which catchment.

Is there a way to move multiple points (different pictures) into a single polygon (the catchments) all at once? It's possible to manually move each photo individually into its respective catchment, but there are thousands of photos.

A catchment and 5 associated pictures. Both the catchment and the points have the same ID number, this ID number was used to determine which points were associated with which catchments. 3 Pictures fall outside of the catchment.

Where clause used to find a catchment of interest, as determined by that days spreadsheet.

Where clause used to determine which points should fall within the catchment of interest. The catchment ID for each attribute table (catchment polygons vs photo points) is different.

Answer 1

If you are familiar with python, you can try with this code (replace "your_catchments_here" and "your_points_here" with your actual layers):

with arcpy.da.SearchCursor("your_catchments_here",["SHAPE@","ID"]) as s_cur:
    for polygon in s_cur:
        with arcpy.da.UpdateCursor("your_points_here",["SHAPE@XY","Catchment"]) as u_cur:
        for point in u_cur:
            if polygon[1] == point[1]:
                point[0] = polygon[0].centroid
                u_cur.updateRow(point)

I did not tested it, but:

1. beware that sometimes the centroid of a polygon could lie outside of that polygon (e.g. half-moon-shaped polygons like)
2. The code is not optimized (it will loop over all the points for each polygons. If you have many points, then let me know and I'll give you a modified version.