1. Tell us about the advantages that GeoGofer provides in the way of image search capabilities.
GeoGofer makes finding your imagery simple. First, you index your local hard drive and shared network folders. There are no complex steps to take; just point GeoGofer at your folders and let it get to work. After you’ve done your initial indexing, all of your images appear on a map, and you can zoom, pan, and query to quickly find the images you need.
2. Is the tagging automatic as images are loaded from a directory?
Tagging can be done automatically; when you import the images just choose the tags you want to add, or create new ones, and GeoGofer will add the tags you specified.
3. What kind of information would you suggest should be manually tagged in order to make the search capabilities effective?
Common tags include project names, favorite imagery, and demonstration imagery. I personally use a “Demo” tag for some of my imagery as I give a lot of demonstrations to customers and press. Since I’m constantly adding new imagery and data to my laptop, this makes it easy for me to find what I need.
4. In what part of a user’s workflow would you suggest GeoGofer works best? Would this be a product that a user might use first to organize multiple image directories?
GeoGofer is best used after you’ve created your othroimages or received images from your data provider, when you’re ready to use your imagery for your projects. GeoGofer absolutely allows imagery from multiple directories, so if you (for instance) have your imagery stored in folders by year, you can easily retrieve imagery from 2012 and 2014 and export them to a new folder or hard drive for your project.
5. GeoGofer works with ArcGIS. What other GIS solutions are capable of using the product or are there plans to integrate it with others?
Currently, GeoGofer requires an ArcGIS Online account, but once you’ve chosen your images and exported them, they can be used in virtually every GIS application. For future versions, we’re looking at other platforms we can natively support, as well as a potential offline version.