In order to display the specific data of a service you're accessing in the most efficient manner it's important to choose the most appropriate imagery format available for that type of data. Open Content Wizard provides you a way to make a simple choice based on what your service layer represents. There may be instances where the alternate choice may turn out to be more appropriate; however, the description of the data method has proved to be an effective method.
| If your service's data consists of satellite imagery or aerial photography it is best rendered by a data format that is designed to compress color and grayscale continuous-tone images. The information that is discarded in the compression is information that the human eye cannot detect. The data format that best satisfies this is JPEG. If your data has a significant amount of transparency it won't work as well because of JPEG's so-called "lossy" compression. "Lossy" refers to JPEG's data compression techniques in which some amount of data is lost. |
 | If your service's data consists of vector, scanned or thematic mapping data it is best rendered by a data format that is designed to work well on line drawings, lettering, or simple graphics with distinct colors. In addition, if your data has transparent cells, this data format, PNG, which has a lossless data compression scheme, is most suitable. |