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Network Image Warehouse (NIW) is a server-side solution for Pictometry software. NIW assists with Image Warehouse management and lightens network traffic.

Traditionally, Pictometry applications accessed Image Libraries through mapped drives (also called “folder shares”). This approach can have administrative issues for large networks and throughput issues for slow networks. NIW can be used to address these issues by facilitating Image Warehouse deployment and by reducing bandwidth consumption.

Network Image Warehouse is designed to work exclusively with Pictometry applications.

Easier Image Warehouse deployment

NIW responds to requests from client applications, such as Pictometry’s EFS. These requests use http or https protocols. Therefore, Pictometry applications can access NIW in a way similar to how one browses the Internet or an internal web site.

No need to replicate warehouses

Because of NIW, Pictometry Image Warehouses need to be installed only on one machine in order to provide access to an entire department, division, company, or county.

NIW eliminates the need to replicate Image Warehouses in order to secure folder shares against unauthorized access. It also eliminates the need to add every username to the security tab of the Image Warehouse folder share. If an Image Warehouse is directly connected to the server running NIW, the warehouse doesn't need to be shared, and there are no folder sharing security issues! If the Image Warehouse resides on another machine, the folder needs to be shared—but only with NIW; no other user machine needs to be configured.

System administrators can control access to NIW by using the security features of Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS).

Less bandwidth consumption

All Pictometry applications search for and retrieve images; most also retrieve thumbnail images and maps. Pictometry applications provide many other features, but these are the features most closely tied to Image Warehouses.

Pictometry-generated Image Warehouses are designed to provide efficient searching, as well as image, map, and thumbnail retrieval. However, due to the sheer quantity of images and image data, searching for and retrieving images and thumbnails can take a noticeably long time on slower networks. NIW can help reduce the amount of data on the network.

On slower networks, NIW can help significantly to speed up both searching and thumbnail retrieval.

Image searches return only the relevant data

When an application searches a mapped drive, data pertaining to both relevant and irrelevant images are transmitted across the network to the application.

When an application requests that NIW perform a search, only the data for relevant images are transmitted to the application. While the amount of data transferred is insignificant when there are only a few images available, it quickly becomes significant when several thousands of images are available. The savings offered by NIW become even more significant when you multiply the data transferred by the number of users of that data. Even on networks that are usually fast, many users simultaneously searching a mapped drive can result in a noticeable network slowdown.

Superfluous data for thumbnail images are filtered out

Although the biggest network bandwidth savings through NIW comes from a streamlined image search, additional savings are available with thumbnail retrieval. NIW accomplishes this by returning only the thumbnail image itself and none of the data that surrounds the thumbnail.

When a mapped drive is used, the data that surrounds a thumbnail must be transferred over the network before the thumbnail can be extracted and displayed.

NIW network environment

The following diagram shows the NIW environment.

NIW requirements

To use NIW, you need a machine running IIS version 5.0 or later and Microsoft ASP.NET 1.1 (part of the .NET 1.1 distribution). You’ll need a minimum of 7.5 MB of disk space for installation. Memory requirements and run-time disk requirements depend on the demand that will be placed on NIW. Microsoft Server 2003 is the recommended operating system.