GDAL
GDAL is the dominant geospatial library for raster data. Its raster capability is so significant that it is a part of virtually every geospatial toolkit in any language, and Python is no exception to this. To see the basics of how GDAL works in Python, download the following example raster satellite image as a ZIP file and unzip it: https://github.com/GeospatialPython/Learn/raw/master/SatImage.zip. Let’s open this image and see how many bands it has and how many pixels are present along each axis:
from osgeo import gdal
raster = gdal.Open("SatImage.tif")
raster.RasterCount 3
raster.RasterXSize 2592
raster.RasterYSize 2693 GDAL is an extremely fast geospatial raster reader and writer within Python. It can also reproject images quite well in addition to being able to do a few other tricks. However, the true value of GDAL comes from its interaction with the next Python module, which we’ll examine now.
