Practical GIS

Other raster formats

We could see when we chose our destination folder that there are a lot more raster formats which QGIS can export to via GDAL and other tools. Most of the time, GeoTIFF is sufficient as it can use various compression methods, handle big rasters with the internal BigTIFF format, and use various data types. There are some cases, on the other hand, when GeoTIFF is not an appropriate data exchange format. For example, when I tried to export raster data from IDRISI 7 in GeoTIFF, QGIS could not handle the output. There might have been a problem with IDRISI's GeoTIFF implementation or a bug in QGIS's (GDAL's) GeoTIFF parser--it didn't really matter. GeoTIFF wasn't the appropriate data exchange format for that case and I had to ...