| About Online Aerial Photographs | >> Manoa MAGIS >> Aerial Photos >> About Online Aerial Photos |
Processing the Images
None of the photos came with metadata, aside from data imprinted on the edges of the aerial photographs. The key to locating these USGS and NOAA images are flightline diagrams that allow you to find the images. USDAimages came with a mosaic of images. Over the last year, using a combination of information on the flightline
diagrams, the edges of the pictures, Manoa MAGIS has created basic metadata for each aerial photograph. Once the metadata was created, we georeferenced each of the flight line diagrams and captured their latitude and
longitude of the center point of each aerial and linked it to each photograph. This center point is
not as accurate as metadata capturing the latitude and longitude at the time the photograph was taken, but
serves as a good approximate to the actual center. Additionally, since USDA aerial photographs do not have
flightline diagrams, we are creating center-point dots using graphics software before bringing it into ArcGIS
to georeference the mosaics.
Putting Images Online
We partnered with Desktop Network Services
(DNS) to find a way to locate, view and download these images. DNS,
offered geoserver(link), an open source server that allows you to publish your geospatial information, including
aerial photographs on the web. Using live imagery and maps from google as a background layer, we have been
able to import locations for the aerial photographs and upload a thumbnail, view and download version of the
aerial photographs. This viewer (link) will allow the user to view and zoom in to areas that he or she is interested
in, check on and off flightline layers, and click on red dots associated with pictures, view a thumbnail, view
a larger image and download a jpeg version of the aerial photograph.
We will continue to process and upload images from all the other islands until we have all of our approximately 8,000 aerial photographs up on the viewer/server.
Acknowledgements
We have many people to thank:
- Martha Chantiny, Wing Leung and Jon Yamaoka of DNS
- Our first MAGIS intern, Brandon Sekiya worked on populating the metadata database as well as georeferenced several flightline diagrams. Jason Tokudaworked part-time on georeferencing many of the flightline diagrams Both Brandon and Jason are graduates of the UH-Manoa Geography department. Brandon continues to work with us now as a flood-recovery assistant
- We could not of course, do without valuable assistance from Ross Togashi and his familiarity with these aerial photographs
- Thanks also goes to Ju Sun Yi, Flood Recovery Assistant, who is working part-time with MAGIS to create a protocol to assign center-points to the USDA mosaics