Do More With Less: Cesium ion Adds ZIP File Support
Cesium ion now supports uploading ZIP files, which greatly reduces the upload time and bandwidth usage for most source data types. ZIP files also let you get more out of your existing ion storage, since it uses compressed file size when calculating storage quota.
The official New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications CityGML model is a set of 20 CityGML files totaling 12.8 GB. Now you can upload it to ion as a single 874 MB ZIP file.
While the bandwidth and storage savings of ZIP files are the main reason for using them, convenience is another. Many data repositories make large, multi-file datasets available for download in ZIP format. Rather than have to unpack these files first, you can now upload them directly to ion.
Sketchfab models can be downloaded as glTF ZIP files and then uploaded directly to ion. Shown here: Sea Keep “Lonely Watcher” rendered as 3D Tiles in CesiumJS.
ZIP files also help overcome browser limitations when uploading datasets spanning multiple folders, since the internal zip folder structure is properly maintained during upload. Previously, it was impossible to upload multi-folder datasets in older browsers such as Internet Explorer, and required using drag & drop in modern browsers.
You can start tiling your own data today by signing up for a free ion community account.