Projection Recovery Tool

The Projection Recovery Tool can be accessed from the Georeferencer Tools menu. Note that you will need to have Source Data loaded in the Source Data Viewer to perform a Projection Recovery, and you will need a minimum of three reference points selected.

Selecting the Projection Recovery Tool menu option will begin the recovery process. If the reference coordinate system is not based on WGS 84, the first step of the recovery will be to prompt the user to specify a datum transformation to convert the coordinates. The user may cancel the Projection Recovery at any time by clicking the Cancel button.

Click Next to apply the transformation. Once the points have been transformed, or if they were already based on WGS 84, the user will be provided a dialog that allows for the selection of various settings to restrict the list of possible projection matches.

Click Next to view the list of all possible matches.

The results are listed in order by "Rank", which is an indication of how close the projection matches. Clicking the Details... button will pop up a display of the details of a given projected coordinate system. The last entry in the list will always be "None of the above". This option and clicking Next will prompt the user to Create a Fitted Coordinate System. Otherwise, clicking Next will move on to a dialog that will enable the recovered projection to be saved with the source data. In the case of vector data, the user will be saving a WKT file:

The user may specify an output location by clicking the Browse... button.

Alternately, if the source data is raster data, a reference file must be created. The user will be given the option of saving one or more of several different formats:

In this case, clicking Browse... will launch a dialog that allows the user to select the file directory and the common file name for the output. In the below example, we may end up creating several different output files all named bigbend_ne.* where * will depend on which output formats have been selected.

Once this process is complete, the users will see a final dialog informing them that the recovery was a success.