Imagery best practices for file and folder arrangement

[maphew]

Hi All,

I'm not sure if this is the appropriate venue for my question. Please redirect as appropriate. STAC-spec is multifaceted and deep, as is warranted given it's a maturity. It's also dense for the newcomer who isn't sure if this is the right place for them. ;-)

I'm in the phase of reorganizing and storing aerial and satellite imagery that cover a broad range of time, supply vendors, geographic areas. I want to invoke the least amount of pain on downstream users and future data custodians, and am wondering if the STAC-spec has practical guidelines to offer. At this point we are not contemplating making the catalogue/collection machine searchable and crawl-able, so STAC-spec is not exactly on target for my project, It is reasonable however to expect we will do want to do this eventually so it would be good to not erect barriers.

Considering a long multi-project time horizon, What is most useful folder arrangement when it comes to storing and using imagery?

• Sensor type > Date > Resolution > Project name or
• Date > Res > Sensor > ... or
• your > scheme > here

Examples:

• Landsat7/2015-07-18/
• 2015/07/SPOT6/ etc.
• orthos/2015/15cm/
• Region_name/satellite/infrared/30m

Phrased another way: what arrangement would annoy you the least in case where your projects read imagery from a read-only source? (The source is not read-only to the custodian, like myself, but it is to users can't alter the folder schema and it's not feasible to copy the files locally.)

Thanks in advance for your time and thoughts.