I have 650 individual raster tiles (MrSID format) representing aerial imagery of a county. Each one is approx. 72 MB in size. As with a lot of aerial imagery, I use this as a base image for other layers, e.g. parcels, roads, subdivisions, etc, for planning purposes.
What is the best way to store/use these for such a purpose? I attempted to create a raster dataset within a personal geodatabase (ArcGIS Basic 10.2), but it was taking an incredibly long time so I cancelled the process. Perhaps my settings could be tweaked to speed up the process? This raster is for my own personal use, not as an image service over a server.
Best Answer
I suggest you to do a Mosaic Dataset Mosaic Dataset ArcGIS 10.2
I did the same thing with lots and lots of ecw files and decided to give this a try and it really works beautifully but you have to have your original files local to prevent you from getting checkerboard.
Read very carefully and it took me a while to understand how this works. Use File Geodatabase instead of Personal Geodatabase.
Good Luck !