King County Modernizes Imagery Access with Self-Service Application

Spanning more than 2,000 square miles and home to the city of Seattle and 2.4 million people, King County is the most populous county in Washington state. With its vast forests and strong tech culture, the county has become a leader in integrating imagery with geographic information system (GIS) technology, empowering everything from conservation and urban planning to infrastructure and public policy. At the core of this work is ArcGIS Enterprise—a powerful system for managing, storing, and analyzing geospatial data.

Leading these efforts is the King County GIS Center. The GIS Center is King County’s centralized GIS services team that manages the countywide GIS in collaboration with county departments and outside agencies. Their collaboration helps departments and agencies share data, plan smarter, and make better decisions. In King County, GIS and imagery do more than support operations—the technology connects people with action.

King County has used aerial imagery in its GIS work for decades. Valerie Bright, senior GIS imaging engineer, recounted how early GIS efforts focused on finding the best available data—no matter the format.

“As soon as the technology existed to digitize and georeference imagery, the county GIS management figured, ‘Why not? We can use this for so much,’” Bright said.

The county began collecting aerial imagery as early as 1936. But in 1998, imagery became crucial when Chinook salmon—a species native and highly valued to the area—were listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. This prompted the King County GIS Center to build a long-term strategy for managing large and continuous imagery datasets to support environmental monitoring—especially for the Chinook salmon.

Instead of funding project-by-project surveys for this work, the GIS Center launched Many Maps One Landscape—a centralized data sharing effort that outlined a framework and process for county departments to pool resources and share critical geographic data.

This initiative built the foundation for a future imagery program at the county because it showed the team how collective data management could work.

As the GIS Center team acquired imagery data, staff recognized the value of consistent investment in aerial imagery for future projects. In 2006, the center created a reserve fund to support aerial photogrammetry of the county every two years. The budget reserve fund enabled the King County GIS Center to pool money from its own annual budget, as well as from other county agencies who wanted access to the imagery, to reduce imagery acquisition costs for all partners. What began as a shared data pool evolved into a full Aerial Imagery Program where external jurisdictions like cities, utility districts, tribes, and airports could also pay into the program and receive updated imagery at an effective cost. The goal: enhance GIS projects across county departments and jurisdictions with high-resolution, repeatable, and accurate imagery data.

“The real driver was the county had previously been cobbling together publicly available imagery, from federal datasets to data the state collected,” Bright explained. “But what we really wanted was higher resolution, dependable repeatability, better accuracy. It’s a lot easier to plan your projects if you know the data is continuing to come.”

After decades of managing the Aerial Imagery Program manually, Bright and her team saw an opportunity to modernize. The Aerial Imagery Program had become a powerful asset for the county, and its cost-sharing strategy brought external agencies together, offering consistent imagery data for the region at a more affordable price. But while the program gathered valuable imagery data for its cost-share partners, the process needed optimization. In 2023, the team proposed a new solution: an interactive map application that would let jurisdictions select and order imagery directly. 

Before this, distributing the imagery to external jurisdictions was a manual and tedious process for the GIS Center team. Participants in the Aerial Imagery Program would submit a shapefile request for an area of interest. The GIS Center team would then overlay the request on a tile system, send the overlay back to the requester for review, and finalize the imagery selections. This back-and-forth was slow and hands-on.

Bright’s interactive map idea would create greater awareness of the county’s imagery acquisitions and make the data accessible to external jurisdictions in a single platform. It shifted imagery access from a manual request process to a user-driven experience—one that would normalize imagery data as a valuable asset in GIS projects across the county.

To bring the self-serve application to life, Bright and her team used ArcGIS Experience Builder, a configurable web app tool that lets users combine maps, data, and widgets into custom online experiences without writing code. Experience Builder allowed the team to create the Aerial Imagery Program’s public-facing application, where users could explore available imagery, learn about the program, and place orders—all in one place.

“The ability to make the Aerial Imagery Program a public platform where we could have a landing page with information about our program was an advantage for us,” said Bright. “It was the first time we really publicly advertised it. Before, it was a lot more word of mouth.”

The King County Aerial Imagery Program app uses a map of the county with tiles of collected imagery overlaid on it. Users can select an area of interest, choose the year of the data collection they need, and receive a cost estimate for their imagery order. Once placed, users can track the status of their imagery orders—making the entire process more transparent and efficient.

While reducing administrative workload was a key driver for the app, transparency around program costs was just as important. The app also streamlined request management and made the program’s pricing and process more visible. This transparency helps partners who use the Aerial Imagery Program—like cities, towns, utility districts, tribes, and airports—better plan and budget for their geospatial work with imagery.

“Our partners need to be able to budget,” Bright explained. “Governments often have biennial budgets, if not longer, so they need to be able to budget [what] their imagery is going to cost. The cut down on the administrative time on the back end was the primary driver for the app, but transparency about the program and its cost were also important.”

With the imagery program, partners in King County have access to actionable intelligence to guide their investments and projects. Developers can visualize site conditions before construction projects, cities can optimize their planning and fieldwork with up-to-date information, utility districts can more effectively monitor parcels and infrastructure, conservation districts can assess water and soil health, and more. The Aerial Imagery Program app has made imagery a practical, everyday tool for decision-making across King County.

By streamlining how imagery is requested, the app has done more than save time—it’s enhanced how GIS projects are planned and executed across the county. This shift in access has helped King County’s partners work more efficiently and collaboratively, laying the groundwork for something even more impactful: trust.

“There’s a big culture of trust at the King County GIS Center,” Bright said. “I think launching the Experience Builder application really helped boost that to the next level because it increased transparency.”

By centralizing imagery and streamlining access, King County has made it easier for people to get the data they need—quickly and reliably. More than just a technical upgrade, the app brings people and imagery together, empowering the county to plan, protect, and serve more effectively.