Trimble Business Center

The project I'm working on had a drone flyover done, I received the point cloud, but also asked if I could be supplied with an image to work with. The guy who was processing it said that he could generate an ortho image but wasn't too sure how to use it as they are normally extremely large in size. I believe he was using TBC to export that. The image files he ended up supplying us were 11GB and 26GB. TBC wasn't able to handle these files, is there any way that I can reduce them to use them in TBC instead of the point cloud? 

My problem is that when I zoom in too far using the point cloud I see black spaces. I'd rather see an image that has a low resolution due to being zoomed in so far.

Ask for images that are around 12,000 pixels x 12,000 pixels (578 MB in memory).  300 DPI at your desired plot scale usually is a good place to start.  These are a practical size to work from.  Multiple images of this are are no problem for a decent computer with TBC.  The 26GB is too big to try and use in a practical sense.  

Hi,

You can always compress Ortophoto images. 26GB image is not usable in the real world, and there is no normal computer that can handle that kind of data. Orthophoto images I normally import to point clouds are maximum 500 MB but desired is around 200MB for normal processing and without lagging.

If you can open the Image in Paint or another Photo Editing package, you can typically Resize the image and change the number of Pixels in one axis and have it scale the other axis automatically. This method can be used to adjust Large Images down to a smaller lower resolution image. However be aware that in the case of JPG, TIF and PNG there is also a "Sidecar File" with extension JGW, TFW, PGW that defines a corner of the image and the number of Pixels in N and E directions and the size of the pixels - if you resize the image then you will also need to edit these sidecar files with a Text Editor to adjust the number of Pixels and the Pixel Size. I created a Spreadsheet for this so that we could edit these files for Google Earth because Google Earth has some size limitations on imagery. I will put up the details of that shortly.

Alan