So is there any repository to just download and install ortho4xp into xplane- like drag and drop? Or does everyone just have to make their own?

My understanding is that because of copyright issues regarding the imagery, everyone must make their own.

Correct, although for Europe you can download L16 tiles from http://zonephoto.x-plane.fr/

 

Some tiles there are made with Ortho4XP (Norway tiles are amazing) and I guess more and more they will be replaced by Ortho4XP

Another problem is that those tiles are big. ZL18 tiles are like 30GB each. I guess ZL16 is much more manageable at likely 2GB each. 

 

I'm recycling my old computers and hard drives at home and getting read to crunch ZL18 tiles to fill some old 2Tb drives. So far I still believe ZL19 looks most amazing, but at 120GB/tile it costs way too much bandwidth and disk space. Just not practical if you ever need more than a few tiles.

 

Even ZL18 is a luxury as you can only fit ~30 tiles per TB drive. But I'm upgrading my home server and I'll soon have a few old 2TB drives to put into use for Ortho4XP. 

So is there any repository to just download and install ortho4xp into xplane- like drag and drop? Or does everyone just have to make their own?

It's amazingly easy. The interface looks a bit intimidating, but you can start downloading after just a few clicks, and from there all you need to do is drag/drop. Check out this video. Osamah is great and he explains the process in a lot of detail, so once you get the hang of it it's a lot faster and easier than he makes it out to be in the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhr4xYosVvI&t=435s

I'll give it a try once we have our next winter storm. I was intimidated, you hit the nail on the head! 

I would highly recommend getting familiar with Ortho4XP because as others have mentioned, once you get past the initial learning curve/ramp up, it's actually easy and straight forward afterwards.

 

I think it's great being able to create your own orthos, especially once you get things like having multiple ZL regions in the same tile all meshing together nicely. (ZL19 around airports, 18 around cities and 17 in the countryside) I manage to save disk space doing that if I instead used ZL18 for all of it.

Best scenery tool at the moment for this platform (and generally because there is no such thing for the others). Latest version is very easy to install and handle. Only downside, but not the fault of the tool, is the inconsistent quality of the source material, colors in particular. 

Would like to give this a shoot during a few down time this week; Which is the best/latest up to date tutorial for ortho4xp?

I've seen a few YT videos but they seems to be missing a step here or there for a newbie to orthoscenery.

While the manual is outdated regarding the installation I would still recommend its section on tile creating. Start with the default French island described therein, it is a quick process and it shows quite well how everything is supposed to work. Make sure that you have version 1.20, so no messing around with graphic tools. Any questions, feel free to post here or PM me. 

Thanks Hans, slow going but getting the hang of things.

Make sure that you have version 1.20, so no messing around with graphic tools.

Are these changes described anywhere?

There are two big forums dedicated to Ortho4XP, one at the org and another one in French. Not sure whether there is a change log. But bottom line the last version is the easiest and the best. Out of the box the results are really impressive. It skips all the complicated setup which came with the first version. 

Is the concept that you load the photo tiles into the program, and it sort of knows where/what to place on it as far as autogen trees and buildings?

It gets the photos for you, converts it to dds files and if set up correctly presents you a complete tile of mesh and orthoimagery. If you want autogen you either need to tell the program to generate an overlay of XP stock data or you generate one with World2Xplane. For the US I recommend the overlay, for Europe World2Xplane. I believe that all these procedures need some thinking in advance: What do you want to display, what graphics appeal to you, how much can your computer process, what do you consider to be a realistic depiction of the world.