LizardTech’s business is not only about compression ratios and lossless quality; it’s about making our customers’ jobs easier by providing the best GIS solutions around while still taking into account their current operations. While much of our team’s time during the last ten months has been spent building and launching LizardTech’s GeoExpress® and Express Server® software products, we’ve also worked (and continue to work) hard to ensure that these products remain compatible with other commonly used GIS software.

Based on your feedback, we know many of you manage workflows that include one or more pieces of Esri software and it is increasingly important for both LizardTech and Esri technologies to integrate seamlessly together. Supported file formats allow projects to run smoothly and make sharing data faster and more efficient. Everyone wins.

To that end, LizardTech has recently made available a free plug-in for interoperability between our Express Server and Esri’s server product, ArcIMS. Express Server 7 came on the scene in July offering exciting features such as added support for raster images encoded to MrSID Generation 4 (MG4™) format and the option to install as a 64-bit application. Now when used together, Express Server makes viewing images via ArcIMS up to 25 times faster!

We also offer free plug-ins that add support for MG4 raster data files in Esri’s ArcGIS Desktop version 9.3.1 and 10. Now Esri’s Arc users can harness the benefits of the new MG4 files that GeoExpress 8 produces, including support for compressing hyperspectral data allowing users to compress up to 255 bands of geospatial data.

You can download the plug-ins for ArcIMS, ArcGIS Desktop 9.3.1 and ArcGIS Desktop 10 here.

We greatly appreciate your feedback and suggestions for future releases, so thank you, and keep it coming!

LizardTech^® announced the release of GeoExpress 8 earlier this week at GEOINT. We’re excited about this latest version of the industry’s go-to manipulation and compression software for raster imagery. Here’s our director of Product Management, Jon Skiffington, giving GISCafe’s Sanjay Gangal the lowdown directly from the show floor.

We’ve had a lot of requests in recent years for support for multispectral and hyperspectral imagery — imagery with more than just the three color bands R, G and B. GeoExpress^® software now supports imagery with up to 255 bands, which for NAIP data users might mean 4-band “RGB plus infrared” (RGBIR). Other users may have imagery with hundreds of narrow bands that they use in specialized analyses.

Support for alpha bands, also new in GeoExpress 8, means users can exercise greater control over transparency in their image data. In creating the alpha band, users can specify that all image data should be regarded as opaque, or they can have GeoExpress query the image metadata to find out what color values to use for transparency areas, or they can specify color values.

We also improved our support for composite mosaics, which in the past were really quick at the viewing end but took a long time to create. Now the speed advantage serves both ends; composite mosaics encode quickly and open quickly in viewers.

These features are all enabled by the fact that we’ve updated LizardTech’s MrSID^® image format. MrSID Generation 4 (MG4™) is the next stage in the evolution of the image format geospatial users have turned into an industry standard. Support for MG4 in your favorite geospatial application by third parties is underway, and meantime, images compressed to MG4 can be viewed by either of LizardTech’s free viewers, the ExpressView™ Browser Plug-in utility or the standalone GeoViewer application (both available for download at http://www.lizardtech.com/downloads/viewers.php).

We hope that if you’re a GeoExpress user, version 8 will be the answer to some imaging needs you may have been just starting to recognize.  And if you haven’t tried GeoExpress…well, there’s never been a better time. Visit our website at http://www.lizardtech.com/downloads/trials.php for a trial download.

Let us know what you think of it!