Atlanta Suburb moves stock images to the cloud and makes them easily accessible to the public
REDLANDS, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–In the years before Johns Creek adopted Esri’s ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online, a team of two in the city just outside of Atlanta had developed innovative ways to manage their data so it was shared across departments were more accessible and to the public. This work included training Amazon’s Alexa device to answer residents’ questions about city services and creating an online open data portal. But the city’s vast archive of images has been one of the biggest challenges in its digitization efforts.
“Bringing our images to the cloud has helped free up time and resources so we can focus more on what matters.”
When the city was incorporated in 2006, Johns Creek began collecting aerial photographs annually. Previously, when the city was worth a new year, the geographic information system (GIS) team undertook the time-consuming task of merging the individual tiles to create a single mosaic image layer of the entire city. It usually takes a few days to cache a year’s worth of images.
To meet this challenge, Johns Creek used ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online from Esri, the world leader in location intelligence, to move all of its imagery, some of it nearly a century ago, to the digital cloud. The shift has given the city’s small GIS department the opportunity to continue refreshing and analyzing this data, rather than spending scarce time maintaining imagery data on physical servers and responding to simple data requests. Now it only takes one day to update the image data of a few years into the city map.
“ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online makes managing our decades of aerial imagery easy and transparent. Staff, consultants and the public can easily access the images at any time and use them for visualization or analysis without sacrificing quality or responsiveness by simply going online,” said Julie Kutz, the city’s senior GIS analyst. “Bringing our images to the cloud has helped free up time and resources so we can focus more on what matters.”
Before the move, maintaining the image data had taken up most of the resources. Among the images once stored on servers are black-and-white aerial photos taken by the Farm Service Agency in 1938 and scanned and gridded into the city’s databases. Another historical set contains black and white photos from the 1950s with hand-drawn elements signaling differences in terrain.
All images are available and searchable online via the Johns Creek DataHub. The results are helping to better inform decision-making in the city of approximately 84,000 people by enabling faster and more reliable access to images.
To learn more about how organizations can streamline operations by freeing up time and server space, visit this ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online site.
Esri, the global leader in geographic information system (GIS), location intelligence, and mapping software, helps customers unlock the full potential of data to improve operational and business outcomes. Founded in 1969 in Redlands, California, USA, Esri Software is used by more than 350,000 organizations worldwide and at over 200,000 institutions in the Americas, Asia Pacific, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, including Fortune 500 companies and government agencies , non-profit organizations and universities. Esri has regional offices, international distributors, and partners providing local support in over 100 countries on six continents. With its pioneering commitment to geospatial technology, Esri develops the most innovative solutions for digital transformation, the Internet of Things (IoT), and advanced analytics. Visit us at esri.com.
Copyright © 2022 Esri. All rights reserved. Esri, the Esri Globe logo, ArcGIS, The Science of Where, esri.com, and @esri.com are trademarks, service marks, or registered trademarks of Esri in the United States, the European Union, or certain other jurisdictions. Other companies and products or services mentioned herein may be trademarks, service marks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
Related Articles on GISuser:
