Getting 'N Sync with Google Earth

First, apologies to those of you who expected to this post to be about America's greatest boy band ever, but I had to do something to increase traffic to the blog.

The latest releases of both Quick Terrain Modeler (7.1.2) and ERDAS IMAGINE (2011) offer the ability to synchronize the viewer with Google Earth.  This is extremely handy for general orientation and given the fact that practically every geospatial professional has Google Earth installed, it just makes sense.  Hats off to both of these companies for making our lives easier.  Sometimes it's the little things that make a difference.  There is at least one script I am aware of to make this work in ArcGIS, but it would be nice if this functionality was built-in.

ERDAS IMAGINE 2011 view synchronized with Google Earth

Quick Terrain Modeler view synchronized with Google Earth

Capitalizing on Local Government’s Investment in LiDAR

My article, Capitalizing on Local Government’s Investment in LiDAR, has be published in the latest issue of LiDAR News.  You can read a related take on this topic on Paul Beaty's blog The Field Guide.  I disagree with Paul on paying for a point cloud classification that goes beyond differentiating ground classes in most cases.  This is because classified points (e.g buildings, vegetation) don't equate to information (2D or 3D features) that can be readily integrated into most GIS software packages used by local decision makers.   I do agree with him that rasterized LiDAR products are the way to go for most GIS users, but I highly encourage people to first view the point cloud and not blindly run a raster interpolation of the data.

Renaming .img Files in ERDAS IMAGINE

In a previous post I covered some of the issues associated with large raster display in ArcGIS 10.  It appears that all of these issues are result of using ArcGIS 10 to rename raster files that are in IMAGINE (.img) but contain an associated .ige file.  The .ige file is a spillover file for "large" raster datasets in IMAGINE format.  For more on .ige files please read Paul Beaty's detailed post on his blog The Field Guide.  The short of it is that for 8-bit data a .ige file is generated when the .img file exceeds ~2.1GB.  When this occurs the .img file becomes less than a 1MB and essentially serves as a pointer to the .ige file.   The problem when renaming these larger rasters in ArcGIS 10 is that the .img file is not updated to point to the new .ige file name.

If you have renamed one of these larger rasters in ArcGIS 10 ESRI has posted a fix.  Please note that this fix does not actually allow you to rename large rasters in IMAGINE format, just correct the problem if you have.  The best way I have found to rename large rasters in IMAGINE format is to use ArcGIS 9.x (I run it concurrently with ArcGIS 10 using VMware Workstation) or use ERDAS IMAGINE.  The screen capture below shows how to rename a raster using ERDAS IMAGINE 2011.