Remotely sensed imagery is gathered mainly by aircraft or satellite, although other platforms, such as rockets, kites, unmanned drones, small-scale (model) aircraft, microlights, balloons, blimps and space craft (Space Shuttle) have also been used.

Imagery in the Solway GDSPDS is compressed using ER Mapper's ECW compression software and LizardTech's MrSID Geospatial Encoder. This reduces the file size of digital imagery quite considerably, and makes it easier to transmit accross the Internet. ER Mapper's Image Web Server (IWS) and LizardTech's Content Server are used to serve and view the imagery on the Internet.

The imagery included in the GDSPDS database are:

• Landsat TM
• Spot Panchromatic
• CASI (Compact Airborne Spectrographic Imager)
• Colour Aerial Photography
• Panchromatic Aerial Photography
• Landcover Map

The image below is displayed using ER Mapper's Image Web Server (IWS). Using IWS, GIS overlays from the ArcIMS map server can be added to the viewer. Images may also be geo-linked to a raster map as well as other images in the database. Other basic image processing techniques such as image overlay may also be carried out.

The image below is displayed using LizardTech's Content Server, serving images compressed using MrSID. XML style sheets allow small thumbnail images of all the imagery held in the GDSPDS to be displayed as well as corresponding metadata about each image.