OptimizeRasters is a tool to convert your imagery and rasters to optimized file formats, move data to cloud storage, and create raster proxies. The result is efficient, scalable, and elastic data access with a lower storage cost. You can use OptimizeRasters via the geoprocessing tool’s user interface in ArcGIS Pro, or call the tool as a Python script directly from the command line, even if ArcGIS is not installed.
New features in OptimizeRasters 2.0 include:
- Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) support
- Updated Google Cloud support
- AWS Lambda implementation
- Simplified workflow for using public buckets and IAM roles
- Option to generate raster proxies as a table to embed directly in mosaic datasets
Often, enterprises store their imagery and raster collections without optimizing access efficiency or minimizing storage requirements. The data might be poorly structured (untiled), missing pyramids, or uncompressed. OptimizeRasters addresses these problems in a few ways.
To improve performance, you can use OptimizeRasters to convert most formats into optimized tiled TIFF, Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF (COG), or MRF formats. The file structure and metadata are preserved, so raster products will work normally in ArcGIS. File conversion speeds up read performance in three ways. First, it improves the data structure, which makes data access and transfer (especially from cloud storage) more efficient. Second, it generates pyramids, which provides faster access to data at smaller scales. Third, it offers optional compression, which further reduces the amount of data stored and transmitted.
As part of the data conversion process, OptimizeRasters can simultaneously transfer raster data to and from cloud (or enterprise) storage, speeding up the process of getting rasters into the cloud. OptimizeRasters supports Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud storage services.
OptimizeRasters can also generate raster proxies to access raster data stored on cloud or network storage. Raster proxies are small files stored on local file systems that reference much larger raster data stored remotely. A user can work efficiently with collections of small raster proxy files, which are accessed by ArcGIS just like conventional raster files. At the same time, the application can access the large-volume, remotely stored raster data as needed (and cache the tiles to speed up repeat access).
What does this mean in practice? Say your data provider delivered your imagery as TIFF files that aren’t tiled and don’t have pyramids. They’ll take a long time to access, and a lot of space to store. With OptimizeRasters, you could transfer these files into cloud storage, at the same time converting them to MRF (which is tiled with internal pyramids) using LERC compression for more efficient access and storage. You could also simultaneously generate tiny raster proxy files to use locally (preserving the .tif file extension), simplifying the process of accessing rasters in the cloud.
To get started with OptimizeRasters, download the setup file from GitHub. (The file should begin downloading immediately after you click the link.) Double click the downloaded file to install it, then check out the documentation on GitHub (or included with the installed files) for further instructions.
Commenting is not enabled for this article.