Setting Rasters to the exact same display

Question

I have been tasked to make a series of .jpeg outputs of different sections of a dike displaying elevation data. My problem is that the data i have been given is GIGANTIC, almost the whole region made of of lots of small squares of raster - none of which have logical names, just random.

The normal way i would deal with these rasters would be to place them in a raster catalog so that they all have the same display so that the seperation between different rasters will not be obvious. The problem is that there are literally 600 tiny squares of raster making up my dataset and my raster catalog has been loading these rasters for almost an hour now with no sight of an end point!

Is there a way i can manually go though each raster (im very fast at clicking!!) or any otherway anyone can think of to make these rasters uniform in their display within arcmap 9.3.1.?

Answer 1

If you have access to GDAL, you could use something like:

gdalbuildvrt dike.vrt *.tif
python gdal_retile.py -of jpeg -levels 1 -ps 1024 1024 -targetDir dike_output dike.vrt

If you use the latest QGIS, these commands are on the Raster menu.

Answer 2

Have you tried using CopyRaster_management in ArcPy?

Using this, you can copy any raster dataset to a format of your choice: Loop through all of your data and copy it out to a jpeg (or another file format).