Custom Imagery
Diamond Maps has the ability to add a layer of locally provided Ortho Imagery to your map in addition to the Google Maps imagery that we provide by default. Your state, county, or city may have some imagery that is either newer or more detailed than the Google Maps imagery.
Pre-requisites
To set this up yourself, your imagery will need to reside on a publicly accessible image server that is capable of serving Google Maps compatible tiles in the Web Mercator projection. This is a popular imagery tiling scheme used by Google, Bing, and Open Street Map.
How To Setup An Imagery Layer
- Go to your list of layers and click the "Add" link
- For the type of layer choose "Tiled Imagery Source"
- Enter the base URL for your tile server. This is typically the portion of the URL up to but not including the X, Y, and Zoom values of the individual tiles.
- Enter a name for this layer. We recommend including the source and year in this name.
- Click Create and proceed to the settings screen shown below.
Note: If a file named "tilemapresource.xml" can be found at the base URL that you provided, then most of the settings on the following screen will be filled in for you at this step.
Settings Screen
Base URL: This field is where you would type in the URL for where your tiled images are stored. Example: https://basemap.nationalmap.gov/arcgis/rest/services/USGSImageryOnly/MapServer/tile
Template: This is the ending part of the URL that defines how the images are organized on the image server. Example: {z}/{y}/{x}
Min/Max Latitude and Longitude: This defines the bounds of the imagery set. Tiles will only be requested from the imagery server for this portion of the world.
Layer name: This is the name of the layer as it will show in your list of Layers.
Visible: This just turns the layer on or off.
X Shift: Set this value to shift the imagery layer a certain number of meters to the east (positive number) or west (negative number). One application of this is to apply a local datum shift for an imagery set with a small coverage area. By default you should leave these shift values as 0.
Y Shift: Enter a positive number of meters to shift the imagery layer north, or negative number to shift it south.
Need Help?
If your city or county has some ortho imagery files that you would like to use but they are not available via an imagery tile server then we may be able to host them for you for a small fee. Contact us for more information. You will need to send us your imagery files in one of the following file formats: SID, ECW, JPG, JP2, or TIF.