GDAL - Geospatial Data Abstraction Library

• sudo apt install gdal
• export GDAL_NUM_THREADS=ALL_CPUS to parallelize
• Use compression, DEFLATE for lossless, JPEG for lossy (large orthophotos).
• Use COG (Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF) for whatever needs to be opened in QGIS.

Snippets

Inspect a GeoTIFF:

gdalinfo in.tif

Turn a GeoTIFF into COG (fast viewing):

gdal_translate -of COG -co COMPRESS=DEFLATE in.tif out.tif

Turn an orthophoto GeoTIFF into COG with JPEG compression:

gdal_translate -of COG -co COMPRESS=JPEG in.tif out.tif

Merge GeoTIFFs:

gdalwarp -of COG -co COMPRESS=DEFLATE in*.tif out.tif

Sum GeoTIFFs (eg sparse LiDAR point clouds)

Change the boundaries of a GeoTIFF (upper left x, upper left y, lower right x, lower right y):

gdalwarp -of GTiff -co COMPRESS=DEFLATE \
    -t_srs "EPSG:5514" \
    -te -602000 -1155000 -594000 -1166000 \
    -r near in.tif out.tif

Merge two GeoTIFFs with the same boundaries, taking max value from each:

gdal_calc.py -A in1.tif -B in2.tif --outfile=out.tif \
    --calc="maximum(A,B)" --format=GTiff --co="COMPRESS=DEFLATE"