download ESRI World Imagery basemap for offline use?

Question

So our search and rescue team would like to be able to view ESRI's World Imagery basemap through the free tool (ArcGIS Explorer). Thing is, we will be offline when we are in the field. So - is there a way to download our region of the ESRI World Imagery basemap, for use offline?

Note, I'm not a GIS professional, so am probably mixing some terminology.

I found the URL where the World Imagery basemap data lives, and the query form to get back a flat image (jpg I think). But, we would really like to have it integrated as a basemap so we can use it seamlessly in ArcGIS Explorer. (Is a basemap a different beast than just a raster layer?)

Is there any way to get this as a 'Data Appliance' from ESRI? link

Our county staff uses the full paid ArcGIS tools so they might be able to get them for our SAR team's use - the issue is that we would want to view it offline in the free tool on our laptops in the field.

We really do want to use ESRI World Imagery, or an equivalent (it is 1 foot = 1 pixel in our area).

Thanks

UPDATE - 2013-10-01 - SOLVED:

gmapcatcher does the trick perfectly. It doesn't read from ESRI World Imagery, but it does download tiles from Bing and others (0.3m in our area) for offline viewing. It's not very feature-rich but that is a big part of the appeal! Learning curve is just about zero. There's probably a fairly easy way to turn those downloaded tiles into a correct directory structure for serving a tileset on MapServer, in order to use it with more feature-packed tools. If anyone finds a quick way to do that tile-file-rearranging please post here, thanks!

Answer 1

If your organization have obtained ArcGIS Server license, then you have access to Data and Maps for Server, which includes map cache for several Esri basemaps that you can use offline including, but not limited to, World Imagery. The World Imagery will only be available down to the 1:1million scale, and must be served by an ArcGIS server instance, so won't be available offline.

World Imagery

This map presents satellite imagery for the world. The map includes NASA Blue Marble: Next Generation 500-meter resolution imagery at small scales, i-cubed 15-meter eSAT imagery at medium scales for the world, and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) 15-meter Landsat imagery for Antarctica. (Sources: Esri, i-cubed, NASA, USGS)

Answer 2

I might be a little late to this party, but I put together a couple of simple python scripts to download map tiles by extent. In my case, I hooked the scripts up as django management commands which wrote to a sqlite database.

This first post is about tile urls for various map content providers:

http://bcdcspatial.blogspot.com/2012/01/onlineoffline-mapping-map-tiles-and.html

Next, I did a post on how to get urls for all tiles within a geograpic extent:

http://bcdcspatial.blogspot.com/2012/02/onlineoffline-mapping-finding-tile-urls.html

The basic usage looked like this:

    '''
The City of New Orleans
xmin: -90.283741
ymin: 29.890626
xmax: -89.912952
ymax: 30.057766
'''

import urllib2

#constructing the template url for arcgis online
template = 'http://services.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/World_Topo_Map/MapServer/tile/{{z}}/{{y}}/{{x}}.png'

tileUtils = TileUtils()
tileFinder = TileFinder(tileUtils, template)
tile_urls = tileFinder.getTileUrlsByLatLngExtent(-90.283741, 29.890626, -89.912952, 30.057766, 11)

for t in tile_urls: urllib2.urlopen(t).read()

The system I ended up building worked well because I loaded every extent I could find (e.g. continent, country, region, eco-region), and could then download all tiles for that area using an id.

Answer 3

UPDATE - 2013-10-01 - SOLVED:

gmapcatcher does the trick perfectly. It doesn't read from ESRI World Imagery, but it does download tiles from Bing and others (0.3m in our area) for offline viewing. It's not very feature-rich but that is a big part of the appeal! Learning curve is just about zero. There's probably a fairly easy way to turn those downloaded tiles into a correct directory structure for serving a tileset on MapServer, in order to use it with more feature-packed tools. If anyone finds a quick way to do that tile-file-rearranging please post here, thanks!

Answer 4

You can try to use GoogleMapsRipper 2.0.4 from http://www.blueblackworks.com to downlaod Openstreet Maps to disk and create ESRI world file.
GoogleMapsRipper is mapping software that allows you to download both satellite imagery, topographic and road maps from OpenStreet Maps. All downloaded map segments are saved on the disk for offline use. You can save maps in several image formats ( .Bmp, .Jpg,..Gif, .Tif, .Png). Georeferencing data can be saved in XML format or ESRI World Files can be created in several formats ( .Bpw, .Jgw, .Gfw, .Tfw, .Pgw).