Esri has officially released ArcGIS Pro 3.7, the latest minor release in the 3.x series, arriving in May 2026 right on the biannual schedule. This release doesn’t introduce breaking changes — your existing projects, scripts, and workflows remain fully compatible — but it does deliver a compelling set of improvements that GIS professionals will notice immediately. From smarter performance diagnostics and AI-powered scanned map extraction to layout enhancements that eliminate long-standing workarounds, 3.7 is a release worth paying attention to.
Here’s a rundown of what’s new and why it matters.
Headline Features
Analyze Map Performance Pane
One of the most practical additions in 3.7 is the new Analyze Map pane, which surfaces potential drawing performance issues before they become a problem in production. The pane evaluates your map and flags issues in three priority tiers:
- Error — must be fixed
- Warning — should be fixed
- Message — optional, but will improve performance
Beyond issue flagging, Drawing Metrics go layer by layer to measure data processing overhead and feature complexity. This kind of visibility has traditionally required guesswork or trial-and-error. Now you can see exactly which layers are causing bottlenecks — whether it’s advanced symbology, unindexed data, or complex query expressions — and address them before deployment. For anyone managing large, data-rich maps for government clients or enterprise environments, this alone is reason enough to upgrade.
Control Layer Visibility by Map Frame
This is a feature that layout cartographers have wanted for a long time. In 3.7, you can now turn layers on and off independently for each map frame in a layout — without affecting other map frames or the main map view.
Previously, if you needed two map frames showing the same geographic area but with different layers visible, you had to duplicate the map. That meant managing two copies of everything: symbology, definition queries, scale-dependent visibility. It was tedious and error-prone. Now, all map frames can reference a single map while displaying different layer combinations.
This is a significant workflow improvement for:
- Comparison layouts (e.g., before/after, two time periods)
- Map books and atlases where context and detail frames serve different purposes
- Report layouts combining regional context and zoomed-in insets
To enable the feature, select a map frame, go to the Map Frame ribbon tab, and click Layer Visibility.
Extract Scanned Lines and Extract Scanned Polygons
Two new geoprocessing tools in the Conversion toolbox bring AI-assisted digitizing to ArcGIS Pro. Extract Scanned Lines and Extract Scanned Polygons automatically generate vector features from binary raster images of scanned maps, dramatically reducing the amount of heads-up digitizing required.
Extract Scanned Lines generates polyline features at the centerlines of raster cells, with controls for:
- Intersection handling
- Compression and smoothing of output geometry
- Treatment of corners, gaps, and holes
Extract Scanned Polygons generates polygon features along raster cell outlines with similar geometry-smoothing options.
Practical applications include:
- Contour lines and elevation data from legacy paper maps
- Rivers and drainage networks
- Soil boundaries and land use areas
- Building footprints
For agencies or organizations still working with historical map archives, this is a substantial productivity gain. What previously required hours of manual tracing can now be seeded automatically and refined as needed.
File-Based Knowledge Graphs
ArcGIS Knowledge graphs previously required an ArcGIS Enterprise deployment to create and use. In 3.7, you can now create and manage a file knowledge graph stored in a local folder — no Enterprise required.
File knowledge graphs support the majority of the visualization, analytics, and data management capabilities available with a service-based knowledge graph. You can:
- Build data models representing real-world systems
- Analyze entity connections using graph queries
- Visualize relationships in link charts
- Explore graph data on a map
This lowers the barrier significantly for smaller organizations, standalone GIS analysts, and consulting scenarios where an Enterprise deployment isn’t practical. It’s a meaningful step toward making knowledge graph analysis more accessible.
Embeddings-Based Analysis (GeoAI)
The GeoAI toolbox gains a new Embeddings Based Analysis toolset in 3.7, bringing semantic similarity analysis to geospatial data. Embeddings use pretrained AI models to convert imagery, geographic features, and text into high-dimensional numerical vectors that capture patterns, context, and relationships. Similar features end up closer together in embedding space, enabling powerful large-scale analysis that runs on standard CPUs.
The toolset includes four tools:
- Generate Embeddings Using AI Models — converts spatial data (imagery, features, text attributes) into semantic vector representations using foundation models
- Find Similar Features Using Embeddings — performs large-scale similarity search across geospatial datasets, with an accompanying interactive Find Similar pane
- Merge Embeddings — aggregates embeddings from one spatial level to another (e.g., ZIP codes to counties), using averaging or area-weighted calculations
- Extract Embeddings To Fields — converts binary BLOB embedding fields to numeric fields for use in other ArcGIS Pro tools
For GIS professionals working in land use classification, site suitability, image analysis, or any domain involving semantic similarity across large datasets, this toolset opens up analytical approaches that were previously outside the reach of standard desktop GIS.
Performance Improvements
Beyond the headline features, 3.7 delivers meaningful speed improvements throughout the application:
- ArcGIS Pro map files (.mapx) and layout files (.pagx) now import significantly faster, with improved drawing speed and responsiveness
- LAZ file performance is improved with the ability to generate statistics, create a spatial index, and decompress LAZ files in parallel
- Enterprise geodatabase data loads faster when adding to a map or opening an existing map
- Deleting features in a relationship class is now faster
These aren’t flashy features, but for day-to-day work — especially in enterprise environments with large datasets — cumulative performance gains add up quickly.
Customizable Toolbars
ArcGIS Pro 3.7 introduces the ability to create custom toolbars for maps and other views. You can populate a toolbar with the tools and commands you use most frequently, reducing the need to switch between tabs and dig through ribbons.
Administrators gain an additional capability: the ability to create system favorites for their entire organization. This enables standardized workflows across teams, ensuring commonly used tools are always one click away for every user.
Layout Enhancements
A few additional layout improvements round out the release:
- All dynamic layout elements are paused when you pause drawing — preventing partial or mid-update renders during complex layout work
- Page queries are now available for all map series types, including bookmark and thematic map series, not just spatial map series
3D and Imagery
The Google Photorealistic 3D Basemap gets more flexible in 3.7. You can now replace portions of the mesh and insert your own more detailed data, enabling hybrid 3D visualizations that combine Esri’s photorealistic basemap with custom data without rebuilding entire surfaces.
The Elevation Profile tool now supports a choice of ground surface when calculating elevation, adding flexibility for terrain analysis workflows.
Coordinate Systems and Portal Management
- Coordinate systems have been reorganized by geographic categories, making them easier to browse and find
- The Portals page has been redesigned with the ability to search for and alias portal connections — a welcome improvement for users managing multiple portal connections
Documentation: New ArcGIS Documentation Center
The built-in help viewer that shipped with ArcGIS Pro has been deprecated in 3.7. It is replaced by the ArcGIS Documentation Center, a separately downloaded application from My Esri. The new Documentation Center:
- Allows downloading help for multiple products, languages, and versions
- Serves offline help locally and opens pages in your default browser
- Can be updated within a release cycle if documentation changes
The offline help now looks and behaves like the online help — a long-overdue improvement for those working in disconnected environments.
Under the Hood: .NET 10
ArcGIS Pro 3.7 moves from .NET 8 to .NET 10, Microsoft’s latest Long Term Support (LTS) release. This is a prerequisite for installation — you’ll need Microsoft .NET Desktop Runtime 10.x.x (x64) installed before upgrading.
The good news: 3.7 remains a minor release with no breaking changes. Existing projects, add-ins, configurations, and plug-in data sources built for ArcGIS Pro 3.x should continue to work without modification. Developers building custom add-ins should audit any third-party libraries for .NET 10 compatibility, particularly those involving cryptography, JSON serialization, or globalization APIs.
Licensing Changes to Know
Two important licensing changes take effect with 3.7:
- Concurrent Use licenses are no longer supported. ArcGIS License Manager was deprecated July 1, 2025, and while it will receive updates into 2028 to support software already in use, new concurrent use licensing is no longer available.
- New Single Use licenses must be obtained through the updated licensing process. Converting between Named User and Single Use or Concurrent Use licenses is no longer possible through My Esri as of December 1, 2025.
Organizations still operating on Concurrent Use licensing should have a migration plan in place.
Upgrading
ArcGIS Pro 3.7 is a minor release, fully compatible with all ArcGIS Pro 3.x versions. Projects created in earlier 3.x versions open normally. The main prerequisite is installing .NET Desktop Runtime 10 before upgrading. For most users, the process is straightforward — update through the software update notification in ArcGIS Pro or download directly from My Esri.
Bottom Line
ArcGIS Pro 3.7 is a well-rounded release that improves daily workflows across the board. The Analyze Map performance pane and layer visibility overrides for map frames are standout productivity improvements that address real pain points. The scanned map extraction tools and embeddings-based GeoAI toolset point toward a future where AI-assisted digitizing and semantic analysis are standard parts of the GIS toolkit. Combined with broad performance gains and the transition to .NET 10, this release is worth prioritizing sooner rather than later.
