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Struggling with Geoimage and Geolocate


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Hi everyone,

 

I’ve been trying to use the Geoimage and Geolocate tools in Vectorworks for the past few months, as I often need to integrate infrastructure into real-world locations.

These tools would be perfect for presenting projects, understanding distances, and generating area reports with more accuracy.

 

However, I keep running into issues that prevent me from using them effectively. Frequently:

  • Satellite images don’t load;
  • They load from a location I don’t want to work with;
  • Or they appear with errors that make the process frustrating.

 

When this happens, I end up resorting to taking a screenshot from Google Maps or Google Earth, then manually scaling and aligning it to match real-world measurements – which is far from ideal.

 

I’ve already watched tutorials on YouTube and followed examples from the Vectorworks University, including this one:
https://university.vectorworks.net/mod/page/view.php?id=744

Still, I couldn’t achieve consistent results.

 

So my question is:
Am I misunderstanding the purpose of these tools?

 

Or am I doing something wrong, and could someone guide me or share practical tips for properly using Geoimage and Geolocate?

Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

 

Thank you in advance!

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10 hours ago, Jeff Prince said:

You must be doing something wrong, Vectorworks is very sensitive to doing things precisely.

 

I set my  georeferencing preferences and then tell Vectorworks the long & lat of where you want the origin to appear.  By default in the US, the view is centered on the Washington Monument.

Thank You for your replay Jeff

I will share with you my workflow:
In all the steps I just followed this tutorial: https://youtu.be/H5kQlGnHaLY , and I tried to adapt them to the place where I needed to see the image (Portugal).

 

image.png.7dcf82d2b5bb93a95c7e3b644de2c260.png

image.png.89b6de0c5f1cb0f9938e6ac4f48d3061.png

image.png.203220ae2ca35ccec91419f3bbc84f32.png

image.png.ba8ef6977f35dda78eea336797e7a118.png

image.png.ed77b061944aa8521593bcf1a9c872a7.png


This is what happened!
image.png.a00d3c9b0159e9801529aa0ad5c0fa45.png



And I tried to adapt it to the place where I needed to see the image (Portugal).

Edited by Cristiano Alves
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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Hi@Cristiano Alves—I did a test with your same process. One thing that might be different is starting in 2024 Update 2 you are required to log in to ArcGIS Online if you want to make use of satellite imagery otherwise the default is OpenStreetMap which is much lower quality and therefore not load if you are zoomed in to the project site. It's free to create an account with ArcGIS online to make use of their Basemaps and public feature layers. You can do that here https://www.arcgis.com/index.html

 

The image will show an error if you are attempting to show the image at too high of a resolution so I would recommend starting with 1024 resolution. Hope this helps!

Screenshot 2024-12-16 at 9.28.50 AM.png

Screenshot 2024-12-16 at 9.29.06 AM.png

  • Like 2
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1 hour ago, Tony Kostreski said:

Hi@Cristiano Alves—I did a test with your same process. One thing that might be different is starting in 2024 Update 2 you are required to log in to ArcGIS Online if you want to make use of satellite imagery otherwise the default is OpenStreetMap which is much lower quality and therefore not load if you are zoomed in to the project site. It's free to create an account with ArcGIS online to make use of their Basemaps and public feature layers. You can do that here https://www.arcgis.com/index.html

 

The image will show an error if you are attempting to show the image at too high of a resolution so I would recommend starting with 1024 resolution. Hope this helps!

Screenshot 2024-12-16 at 9.28.50 AM.png

Screenshot 2024-12-16 at 9.29.06 AM.png

 

@Tony Kostreski has it really been like this since VW2024 Update 2?

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

I have had similar experiences trying to use the built in satellite imagery or maps - frequent failures to download or other errors. It shouldn't really be necessary to fiddle about with resolution to make it work. This part of the tools (image download from server) needs to handled much better I think. As it is, it can be very frustrating, especially when it can be a bit difficult to understand what's going on with the GIS tools anyway.

  • Like 3
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  • 3 weeks later...
On 1/8/2025 at 2:14 PM, line-weight said:

I have had similar experiences trying to use the built in satellite imagery or maps - frequent failures to download or other errors. It shouldn't really be necessary to fiddle about with resolution to make it work. This part of the tools (image download from server) needs to handled much better I think. As it is, it can be very frustrating, especially when it can be a bit difficult to understand what's going on with the GIS tools anyway.

Maybe a download is done and it is not always necessary to update it.

But in fact, it's not working very well here.

 

 

Additionally, Does anyone know how we can download 3D terrain volumes via satellite?

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