ECW
ECW (Enhanced Compressed Wavelet) is a proprietary but widely used raster format for very large aerial and orthophoto archives. Wavelet compression keeps files small enough to host and stream provincial or national imagery while preserving visual quality.
Municipalities and provinces often manage years of orthophotos in ECW alongside GeoTIFF. Instead of legacy on-premise image servers, organizations host ECW and GeoTIFF archives in the cloud and publish via WMS to GeoApps.
ECW is not vector data or a service itself — it is a storage format. GeoTIFF is open and more broadly supported; ECW remains popular for large historical archives. In GeoApps you combine ECW/WMS layers with PDOK, BGT, and internal data in one viewer.
New projects increasingly choose GeoTIFF or cloud-native tiles (WMTS), but ECW remains relevant for existing archives and migration paths.
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