4 replies to this topic

[EmmaG]

hello,
I am looking for some kind of a software that will help me to convert my Orthophotos into Shapefiles,
by this I mean that I want my orthophotos to be shown in GIS format, as an index, that'll include information about the sources of the various tiles that i have.


thank you for your help.

[Sv_BG]

The orthophotos are rasters, and shapefiles are used to store vector data. You can't just convert an orthophoto into vectors, but you can use any remote sensing software ( ENVI or ERDAS for example) to extract the data from the orthophoto images. Or you can use GIS software, like ArcGIS or Mapinfo, to digitize the information you need from the orthophoto and save it in .shp or whatever date format you need.

p.s. If you just want to have somekind of a grid of your orthophoto images you can use ArcGIS to create it. Digitize their borders, or use their four corner coordinates to create the polygons and then fill the information you want in their attribute tables.

Good luck,
Svetoslav

[graveldraw]

GDAL: gdaltindex is an excellent tool for this. It's free and available for different platforms.

Assume you have several orthophotos in tiff format. The command below creates the shapefile "arkansas.shp" containing polygons of the orthophotos (outline of each .tif file). The DRG column in the shapefile contains the full name of the .tif file, "Sand_gap.tif". The first time it is run, you will get an error messages, because the arkansas.shp does not exist. If you add more orthophotos to the directory, and run the same command, it appends the arkansas.shp without error message.

gdaltindex -tileindex DRG arkansas.shp c:\orthophotos\*.tif

See http://www.gdal.org/gdaltindex.html

I installed this software as the fwtools some time ago.

Dan

[Robert2009]

Not sure if this is what you are looking for, take a look at this script from ESRI's Arcscript website. http://arcscripts.es....asp?dbid=15732

This is good. What it does it will create an index from each raster into "borderline" and populate it.

Robert

[Kathi]

You could also load your orthophotos into a raster catalog. You can then define wheter you want the raster catalog to display as tiles or as the actual rasters (or as both, depending on the scale they're viewed at). I do believe that there is the possibility to add attributes to the raster catalog e.g. the source for the raster, time the photo was taken etc, but don't quote me on that.

Hope this helps,
Kathi