Since I started working at Planet, I kept hearing about Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs (COGs). My colleague Chris Holmes even wrote a post explaining what they are and how they’re useful. I decided to implement a Go library to be able to work with COGs. Much of Planet’s satellite imagery is in the GeoTIFF format, including this nice image of Los Angeles from our February 2018 Global Basemap:
An image of Los Angeles from Planet’s February 2018 Basemap. ©2018 Planet Labs Inc, CC BY-SA 4.0.
As a first step to writing a library, I needed to learn about 1) Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs, 2) GeoTIFFs in general, and 3) even more general than that: TIFFs. I’ve always found binary file formats intimidating they just look like gibberish when you dump them into the console! But there’s logic in that gibberish. Here’s what you can gain from my exploration of this 30-year-old file format.
Canada
Canadians
Frank-warmerdam
Dana-bauer
Ifds-ian-hansen
Chris-holmes
Joe-kington
Patrick-armstrong
Los-angeles
Sian-hansen
Twitter
Developer-center