2003.07.26 19:15 "[Tiff] Any suggestion on a user friendly utility?", by Andrey Kiselev

Maurizio,

I use a number of packages for the processing of remote sensing images and vectors and I have often to extract tags while processing within graphic packages.

Till now I just needed to preserve a simple tfw file to maintain the georeference.

However I am now handling very large images in a large variety of projections some of which which are not north oriented, so a simple tfw file is no longer sufficient. More than 3 years ago I did experiment with a number of tiff utilities from this site but the fact that they had to be operated from the command line and the fact that everytime I had to attempt a few times before I could get the correct name of the file (most of the files have very long filenames) made me choose Geotiff Examine by Mentor which was much more friendly to use.

Try to use a better shell. Standard Windows cmd.exe is not a good choice to work with the command line. Try out zsh (http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/), you will be impressed.

However this program is very basic and ignores most tags, in particular datum, projection and rotation.

Could anyone suggest a Window program if available (and possibly freeware) which can store all tags and then put them back into the tiff?

Do you mean you need a tool to extract georeferencing from GeoTIFFs and store this information in external file, process GeoTIFFS with some other (not GeoTIFF aware) software and apply georeferencing back to the processed TIFFs?

Ideally I would like the program to be able also to convert non standard geotiffs into standrd geotiffs: recently I have had problems getting MrSid to compress certain tif files because in non standard format; I had to convert them in "planar" tiffs (I am not sure what that means, just that I load them in a graphic program such as Corel Photopaint and save them) before MrSid was able to compress them.

MrSID software uses standard libtiff and libgeotiff libraries, so shouldn't be any serious problems here. But anyway, to identify the problem you should provide more info about unusual files. At least tiffinfo output required.

By the way: I have another problem. I am working on a large Aster mosaic and putting vector info on it. My remote sensing package works fine with a rotation angle (roughly 12 degrees), but the GIS package I use (Arcview/ArcMap) does not seem to be able to. This means that I have to put all the labels by hand in a separate graphic processing package (Corel Draw). Any suggestion/advise from anyone?

I'm recommend using GDAL (http://www.remotesensing.org/gdal/). This package contains gdalwarptest utility which will do required geometric transformation for you. GDAL can read ASTER Level 1B datasets, extract georeferencing and produce transformed results in GeoTIFF format. Moreover, Level 1A ones could be transformed and referenced as well. But... all GDAL utilities are the command line ones :-)

Regards,
Andrey

Andrey V. Kiselev
Home phone: +7 812 5274898 ICQ# 26871517