Wind Environmental Services advocates the broader use of geo-tagged photos for field data collection and forest management. There are six or more cameras on the market today with built-in GPS, and geo-tagged pictures of road conditions, fire damage, logging activity, and storm damage document on-the-ground conditions. The benefit of photo data collection is that everyone can take a picture, and so that makes a broad number of personnel into data collectors.
Wind River’s WindImage extension into ArcGIS allows you to work seamlessly within your GIS software, and it creates a raster record directly into the geodatabase. Because the photo is in the geodatabase, they can be quickly and easily deployed and viewed in ArcMap, ArcReader, ArcGIS Explorer and distributed to web applications with ArcGIS Server. The quick distribution of photos plotted on a map adds a whole new level of insight, particularly with evolving situations.
