About adding image services to Web applications in Manager

ArcGIS Server image services are designed to efficiently serve raster data in network and Web environments. You can add image services when creating a Web application in Manager. To do this, click Add Layer, make a connection to ArcGIS Server, then select the image service you want to add.

Image services expose some additional properties in the Layer Properties pane. You can choose the compression quality of the image and designate whether the image should draw as grayscale or color composite. If you use a color composite image, you can choose which bands are associated with red, green, and blue values.

The Identify and Measure tools cannot be used with image services and do not appear in a Web application in which the only layer is an image service.

For more information about image services and how to publish them, see the topic Image services in the ArcGIS Server Help.

Supported raster bit depths

The bit depth (also known as pixel depth) of a cell determines the range of values that a particular raster file can store, which is based on the formula 2^n (where n is the bit depth). For example, an 8-bit raster can have 256 unique values, which range from 0 to 255.

Some bit depths cannot be exported to the common Web image formats supported by the .NET Web ADF (JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG). Consequently, rasters with the following bit depths cannot be added to your Web application: 8-bit signed, 16-bit signed, 32-bit unsigned, 32-bit signed, 32-bit floating point.

If you use a 2-bit or 16-bit unsigned depth, the Web ADF forces the return of a PNG image, the only supported Web image format for these depths.

Additionally, the following bit depth/image format combinations are not available: 4-bit color map as JPEG; 8-bit color map as JPEG; and 8-bit, 3-band as GIF.

To learn more about bit depths, see Bit depth capacity for raster dataset cells and Technical specifications for raster dataset formats in the ArcGIS Desktop Help.