[Talk-us] USGS Tiled High Resolution Orthoimagery

Josh Doe josh at joshdoe.com
Mon Jun 6 18:09:18 BST 2011


Has anyone used the USGS High Resolution Orthoimagery available via
the Tiled Data Distribution System (TDDS)? The Seamless data is what
is available via the USGS WMS servers as described on the wiki,
however there's a great deal of imagery which is not on this service:
http://orthoimagery.cr.usgs.gov/dispatches/PRODUCT_Orthos.html

At least for my area, the imagery from the Tiled service is far
superior to what is available on the Seamless service (via WMS).
However, this imagery can only be obtained by getting download URLs
from their website or via a SOAP service, which results in a ZIP file
containing the requested tile. In my case the tile was a GeoTIFF, but
other formats may be possible. Of course, to make this usable in JOSM
or Potlatch, more work must be done. Perhaps the easiest method would
be to run GDAL2Tiles on the GeoTIFF to create a TMS-like cache.

I'd be interested to know if anyone has used the TDDS. It would be
quite useful to create a script that queries the USGS servers for
available layers, downloads the appropriate ZIP packages, runs
GDAL2Tiles on them, and then provides the user with a directory/URL
that can then be used in JOSM (I'm not sure if Potlatch provides for
local caches). However if someone has already created such a script,
you'll save me the effort!
Thanks,
-Josh



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