The ArcPad Team Blog

Unofficial stuff from the team behind the World's leading mobile GIS platform

Thursday, December 09, 2010

Export Photo Layer Tool

I noticed that the question of exporting photo layers came up in the recent training seminar, and is also on the Ideas portal. Time to revisit a tool that's actually been in the ArcPad installation since ArcPad 7 - Export Photo Layers to shapefiles. Is it an applet? Is it a tool? Is it a sample? Umm... (all of the above?). This lack of classification probably explains why it seems to have been missed in the various forms of documentation and discussion (Also the fact that there's very little to explain about it, other than its existence). How bout i make up for it right now?

In the ArcPad installation folder you will find a sub folder called \Tools\. In here are three files: PhotoLayerTools.apa, PhotoLayerTools.ico and ExportPhotoLayer.ico. Copy these files to your preferred applet folder (eg: C:\Users\Public\Documents\ArcPad\Applets) and start using the applet in ArcPad.

The applet functionality is very basic:
  1. open a photo layer in ArcPad
  2. tap the Export PhotoLayer button
  3. select the photo layer from the dialog, and tap the Export PhotoLayer button.
When complete you will have a shapefile in your pictures folder, that you can use in other applications. Done.