[GIS] simple way to clip multiple layers and orthophotos

arcgis-10.1arcgis-desktoparcmapcliporthophoto

(*disclaimer, I don't know any Python/scripting) Ok, so I have clipped several layers in the past using Arcmap 10.+, but I am having a hard time wrapping my head around how hard it can be at times.

I used to own a photography/design business, so I'm used to manipulating crops via Photoshop. I think because of this, I have issues with simple clipping when composing a map.

For this current clip/crop, I would like to freehand a polygon around several connected streams and "crop" out everything around that polygon. Within the polygon, there are several layers having many polylines and points, and a Ortho_tile_tiff catalog layer aerial view. I believe it's this Ortho_tile geodatabase that's throwing me here. If someone could break it down for a semi_green GISer I would be much appreciative. Thanks!

Best Answer

Here are a few options for clipping in ArcGIS:

Clipping the DataFrame This allows you to draw a shape with the draw tools and "Clip to shape" which may be more what you're looking for. You should be able to draw a shape like a polygon and clip to it using this option.
Using the Editor to clip. This is a quick and dirty way to clip your existing dataset, however, again, no rasters.
What your most familiar with no doubt is using the tool Clip you could always create a separate shapefile with your polygon area and clip everything to that. However, this won't work with raster files. You need to use a separate tool to clip rasters. You could always design a simple model builder with these clip tools in order achieve this faster.

This blog post highlights different ways to clip a raster which you may also find useful. If you don't find this answer sufficient please update your post as to what exactly you're having difficulty with or what isn't working.

Related Solutions

[GIS] way to “disperse markers” across multiple point layers

I don't see any direct way, but it'd be easy enough to perform a Merge (docs) on the input data, mapping a field to retain information about the origin layer. In some cases, you may be able to use this merged layer directly, and symbolize the different features within it. Perform disperse markers on the merged set, and use as-is or split on the unique features mapped from fields.

If you only care about making them non-overlapping, and not their specific location, you could displace each layers positions by some systematic amount below the actual mapped resolution of your data, so that they were naturally clustered when mapped. For example, if you had layers A and B, you could make the least two significant figures of A something independent from B:

layer    lat     lon    rule perturbed_lat perturbed_lon
    A   33.0  -120.0  +0.033        33.033      -119.967
    B   33.0  -120.0  +0.011        33.011      -120.989

Now if you perform disperse on one of these layers, the data will already be clustered into distinct areas of the map. You'd have to play with the offset values and figure out an appropriate offset. But this approach would give you a systematic way of preventing collisions between layers.

[GIS] Batch script converting and resampling orthophotos

You might want to consider using gdalwarp instead of gdal_translate as it gives you the ability to control the output pixel size more precisely.

eg.

gdalwarp -tr 10 10 src.ecw dst.tif

You can also specify a variety of resampling kernels. For such radical downsizing averaging might be appropriate.

eg.

for %i in (*.ecw) do gdalwarp -ps 10 10 -r average %i %~new_resize.tif

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[GIS] way to “disperse markers” across multiple point layers

[GIS] Batch script converting and resampling orthophotos

Related Question