Case Study: City of Rockville achieves full-color image preservation and faster downloads with Extensis GeoExpress

Improves Image Processing and Uses Storage Resources More Efficiently

The City of Rockville, Maryland, which maintains water, sewer and storm drain utilities, preserves more than 8,500 large-format engineering drawings dating back to the 1940s for online viewing and printing. To save space and speed transfers, the city originally scanned documents as 1‑bit TIFFs, but that approach sacrificed color and grayscale fidelity and displayed poorly in legacy ArcView viewers. Rockville’s goals were to reduce file size, retain image quality and speed access.

Using MrSID wavelet compression via Extensis GeoExpress, Rockville now stores full 24‑bit color images at an average of just 6 MB each, while the Scalable Server and License Manager enable server-based access and multiple concurrent users. The result: preserved image detail, much faster downloads and better display in existing GIS viewers, plus a more flexible workflow and more efficient use of storage.

City of Rockville

Marc Weinshenker

GIS Manager