Ok.....sorry it's taken me a while to post again. Got caught up with something else. Considering the info and dimensions I have right now pending on what you say about how I got those tiled images.
In Lat/Lon: TL - lat = 40.117268 lon = -88.248281 BR - lat = 40.082274 lon = -88.205980 In Pixels: Image Width = 2602 Image Height = 2800 X pixel dimension: (-88.205980)-(-88.248281) 0.042301 ________________________ = _____________ = 0.000016257 2602 2602 Y pixel dimension: 40.082277-40.117268 -0.034991 ________________________ = _____________ = -0.000012497 2800 2800 Yeah, I see how I reversed them. I was thinking max was the greatest number in lat/lon or meters and not in regard to the image and its coordinate system. With the numbers provided so far, his should be right - right? - Chris Subject: RE: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] Rasters, TileIndex and Shapefiles - Oh My! Really Confused Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2007 18:25:52 -0400 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; MAPSERVER-USERS@LISTS.UMN.EDU Chris – (I added the list back to the reply line – please always reply to the whole list – thanks) A world file is in the units of the image’s projection, not the other way around. Having a world file does not mean the image is in UTM projection. The UTM projection is a popular one, but it’s certainly not the only one. For a map in Illinois UTM is certainly a possibility, but an Illinois State Plane Coordinate System projection is also a possibility – especially if the original imagery came from the State of Illinois. And geographic lat/lon coordinates are also a possibility due to the increasing number of people in the world who seem to think the Earth is flat (at least on the Web). I don’t know which campus you’re using, but if you’re at UIUC then the UTM coordinates will be in UTM Zone 16 with values of around 395000 (X or Easting) 4440000 (Y or Northing). If your numbers don’t look like those, they’re not UTM. Oh, sorry – I started answering before reading all the questions, and you later seem to confirm that your coordinates are indeed UTM. But you got the formulas backwards, and X should be positive while Y should be negative- not the other way around. And the measurements in your world file are indeed in meters, but that’s because those are the native units of the UTM projection being used. There’s nothing that requires them to be in meters; many US state plane coordinate systems use units of feet, and those would appear in the world file, too. Now it is highly unlikely that your pixel resolution is different in each dimension. You could average those two numbers, or double-check your coordinate values (you didn’t say what source you used to get them). If you got this image from a GIS source, I would say that if you think the dimensions are different you’re wrong, but who knows what the University did to munge the image into a pretty picture. So maybe the dimensions ARE different; that’s not impossible, just odd. I still would double-check your measurements and math, but if you get the same answer that’s OK. Once you do that you just have to crank out those world files! - Ed Ed McNierney TopoZone.com From: Christopher Harris [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2007 1:13 PM To: Ed McNierney Subject: RE: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] Rasters, TileIndex and Shapefiles - Oh My! Really Confused Wow. Thanks Ed. You went to a lot of trouble. Most of this stuff you've explained I have a handle on. I wikipedia'd how to make a world file when I did that previous app. And yes, it's the same app with the image that's in UTM projection. I actually have one last question about that, but I'll do a separate post for that. This is a modification of that app. See, I've been using this "Parking Lot" map for the University of Illinois, because I couldn't find a better looking one. Well, yesterday, I noticed that you could go their full campus map and right click on each individual tile and save it as a .gif. I had tried this before but was apparently clicking on certain, wrong areas of each tile every time where I guess the javascript was blocking me. The javascript that they use displays info on certain buildings when you click on them. If you happen to right-click on or around a building and try to save, you can't. You have to click somewhere else on the tile that's on or around a building. Anywho - my boss now wants me to take what I've done with that one pic of the "Parking Lot" and now apply it to a big tiled image of the entire campus (enter the tiles I've saved). That's the back story as to what's going on. I have 3 questions now. #1 You asked if the image is in UTM. I'm basing the image projection on the world file. I remember you (or maybe this one other guy on this list serv) telling me before that you can't distinguish what projection a world file is in - that that's one of the cons to world files. Every example I've ever seen after typing in "World File" in Google shows a world file that is in meters and says that it's using UTM projection. That's still the case right? Oh, the lat/lon has to do with me reprojecting. See, someone passes me a lat/lon coordinate (a center point). I then take that, and convert it to UTM, because the map's projection is in UTM due to the world file being in UTM. Thanks for your time and patience by the way. You've been a huge help. #2 The one thing I'm hazy on in regard to the world file is: the 1st and 4th line - pixel size in the x-direction and y-direction in map units/pixel I understand why x is positive and y is almost always negative. But, does that mean, for example, if I type 2 for the 1st line and -2 for the fourth line, then there will be 2 meters per pixel going both directions? For that I could never find an example of what they meant. I just assumed that. I usually work best with seeing an example, and one was never provided on any of the pages I visited. #3 "The X pixel dimension will be (maxx – minx) / xpixels, and the Y will be (miny – maxy) / ypixels. You should find that the X number is -1 times the Y number." Is pixel dimension related to question #2? For instance (in meters): TL - 393898 4441379 BR - 396253 4438945 maxx=393898, maxy=4441379 minx=396253, miny=4438945 DeltaX=-2355, DeltaY=2434 Say the mosaic's dimensions in pixels are.........: X=1500, Y=2000 X pixel dimension = -2355/1500 = -1.57 meters/pixel Y pixel dimension = 2434/2000 = 1.217 meters/pixel That right? - Chris Subject: RE: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] Rasters, TileIndex and Shapefiles - Oh My! Really Confused Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2007 14:45:54 -0400 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; MAPSERVER-USERS@LISTS.UMN.EDU Chris – OK – it’s not as bad as all that – don’t fire up Photoshop yet. If you have a set of tiles which together create a seamless large image, and those tiles are of a regular size and shape, don’t bother pasting them together. Each world file has six numbers in it, two of which will be 0. For each image tile you need a world file that contains the X/Y coordinates of the upper left pixel of the image (two numbers), and the dimension (size) of each pixel in X (one number) and Y (one number) units. In the vast majority of cases the last two numbers will be identical except for sign (the Y value is normally a negative number since Y values decrease as you go from the top to the bottom of the image). If your images make a rectangle when pasted together, just treat them as one. Find the X/Y coordinates of the upper left corner of the entire image area, and the X/Y coordinates of the lower right corner of the entire image area. Find the size of the entire mosaiced rectangle in X and Y pixels. The X pixel dimension will be (maxx – minx) / xpixels, and the Y will be (miny – maxy) / ypixels. You should find that the X number is -1 times the Y number. For all your world files, these two X and Y extent values (the first and fourth lines) will be constants. The last two lines are the upper left X and Y coordinates of each tile. Your tiles will all have the same Y value across each row, and the same X value down each column. You know what the upper-left corner of the upper-left tile is, because you measured it. You know the number of X pixels in each tile and the number of Y pixels in each tile, and you now know the size in X and Y units of each pixel, so you know the extent of each image tile in X and Y units, so you can calculate the upper-left corner coordinate of the image to the right and the image below. Repeat until complete. All your measurements need to be done in the units of the image’s coordinate system. Is this the image you were asking about earlier that’s in UTM projection? If so, you need UTM coordinates, NOT lat/lon. I wouldn’t recommend Google Earth as a very accurate way to do that, but if it’s close enough for you and easy that’s OK. If you can easily find the corners of your image area on a topo map you can do it on TopoZone and get UTM coordinates accurate to within a few meters just by clicking on the spots that match the corner points of your image. If there isn’t an obvious landmark at the corner, you can pick a prominent location NEAR the corner and just measure the number of pixels away from the corner it is. It’s just a bit more bookkeeping but does the same thing. - Ed Ed McNierney TopoZone.com From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Christopher Harris Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2007 11:15 AM To: MAPSERVER-USERS@LISTS.UMN.EDU Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] Rasters, TileIndex and Shapefiles - Oh My! Really Confused Thanks again, Ed. I need to clear up some things that I guess I didn't make clear. I know that a world file provides georeferencing. I meant to say that I had a .gif that had no georeferencing info associated with it, and then added one. From there I got my initial app to work (displaying the big map). One thing I omitted was that the little .gifs (tiles), when assembled, make up a different big map pic then the one where mentioned : “it uses one .gif (the big map pic), attaches the big map to the globe via a world file. That big map .gif had no georeferencing info attached to it." Before I had a pic of a large section of a college campus. Now I have a pic of the entire campus, but in little tiles. I know Mapserver makes maps and not pics too. I probably just worded something wrong. "So – what do you know about these images? Do you really have a world file that correctly describes your big GIF image? Do you know exactly how the little images were created from the big image? If so, you should be able to figure out how to generate world files for each individual image. If not, you’ll need to get that information for your big image." Yes, I have a world file, but it's for the pic that shows a large section of the campus - not for the big pic that is the sum of the little pics. Ok, so then I have to have a world file for every little tile, but before that I need to correctly set up the world file for the big pic, which I guess I'll need to assemble in Photoshop. Does that sound right? I can do it, it's just a bit tedious lining up the tiles and such. Also, how do you correctly align a pic of some map on the globe. I've been using Google Maps to do it. I'll sit there and study where the pic's corners should approximately be, then get the lat/lon from that (clicking directions to or from will yield the lat/lons). Thank you. - Chris Subject: RE: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] Rasters, TileIndex and Shapefiles - Oh My! Really Confused Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2007 13:36:42 -0400 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; MAPSERVER-USERS@LISTS.UMN.EDU Chris – Let me suggest you try to get unconfused just one step at a time! “it uses one .gif (the big map pic), attaches the big map to the globe via a world file. That big map .gif had no georeferencing info attached to it.” That’s a bit of a contradiction. A world file is one way of providing georeferencing. If you’ve got an image “attached” to the Earth via a world file, you’ve georeferenced it. MapServer makes maps, not pictures. One of the chief differences is that a map has geographic location information associated with it. When you ask MapServer to generate a map for you, you need to tell it the location of the map you want in some coordinate system. In order for MapServer to know which of your GIF images to use in making the output map, it needs to know the geographic location of each of those images. Otherwise it couldn’t figure out which ones to use. A TILEINDEX is step two in the process. Once you have a set of more than 1 properly georeferenced images that you’d like to use like a single logical image, you can create a TILEINDEX to do that. But you have to completely and correctly make it through step one first. Once you get the individual images properly georeferenced, gdaltindex will just work. So – what do you know about these images? Do you really have a world file that correctly describes your big GIF image? Do you know exactly how the little images were created from the big image? If so, you should be able to figure out how to generate world files for each individual image. If not, you’ll need to get that information for your big image. If you do have that world file and know how the tiles were created, let us know (you can post the world file in your reply – it’s just six lines of text). - Ed Ed McNierney TopoZone.com From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Christopher Harris Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2007 10:02 AM To: MAPSERVER-USERS@LISTS.UMN.EDU Subject: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] Rasters, TileIndex and Shapefiles - Oh My! Really Confused Hi. I have a map that is broken up into a bunch of .gif tiles. I want to display them on a layer in Mapserver. I have working version of what I want to accomplish, but it uses one .gif (the big map pic), attaches the big map to the globe via a world file. That big map .gif had no georeferencing info attached to it. These .gifs have no georeferencing information included or attached as well. I read Section 4 (and Section 9 too) on the mapserver site page: http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/docs/howto/raster_data >From this I learned that I need a tile index shapefile. I noticed the snippet at the bottom of Section 4 about gdaltindex and creating a tile index shapefile. I tried that. Here's what I typed: gdaltindex u_of_ill.shp ~/Desktop/UofImapSquares/*.gif Here's what was returned to me: It appears no georeferencing is available for `/home/jimbo/Desktop/UofImapSquares/A0.gif', skipping. It appears no georeferencing is available for `/home/jimbo/Desktop/UofImapSquares/A12.gif', skipping. and so on......... Ok. Yes. I know. There's no georeferencing info attached. But, how do I go about attaching georeferencing info? And how do I create, edit, and view a shapefile? And lastly, do I need a world file to determine a global position for every tile? I tried using a text editor Gedit (I figured What the Hey?) to open them and nope - wasn't in UTF-8 encoding. I did some digging Google and noticed that you can use ArcView GIS, ArcMap, ArcGIS, and ArcCatalog to create, edit, and view shapefiles. I also stumbled across posting that talked about ShapeLib created by Eduardo Patto Kanegae and maintained by Frank Warmerdam. I don't have money to spend on buying some GIS program, and ShapeLib seems like the answer. Could anyone help? - Chris Get news, entertainment and everything you care about at Live.com. Check it out! Explore the seven wonders of the world Learn more! Connect to the next generation of MSN Messenger Get it now! _________________________________________________________________ News, entertainment and everything you care about at Live.com. Get it now! http://www.live.com/getstarted.aspx