Is there a way to erase GeoTIFF header?

Question

I've got some GeoTIFF files that have wrong bounding box extent and wrong CRS associated to.

Fortunately I know the right CRS, but even associating it to the files (I've tried both with QGIS and ArcCatalog) their extent remains the wrong one.

So I was wondering if there's a way to completely erase the GeoTIFF header file, then assigning the CRS and obtaining the correct bounding box.

Answer 1

Try converting them to another format, if you convert them to a PNG for example the headers will not be stored on the image but in a separate file. These can then be deleted before converting the pngs back to tiff. Might want to think about what format you use so you don't lost information along the way. I've done this a few times with veal_translate but of course arc will be able to Handel it to :).

Answer 2

I believe you can use gdal_translate and set the bounding box using the -a_ullr argument.

Answer 3

To expand on @Garrett Hall's answer, gdal_translate is indeed what you need. Something like this should work:

gdal_translate -a_srs <CRS> -a_ullr <xmin> <ymax> <xmax> <ymin> src.tif dest.tif

Where <CRS> should be something like EPSG:27700 and <xmin> <ymax> <xmax> <ymin> should be the known extents of your image.

Answer 4

I think Garrett Hall's suggestion of using gdal_translate is probably the quickest and easiest solution. However, you can also read your data into a numpy array and write it back out in tiff format with the proper extent. Using arcpy it might look like:

import arcpy
a = arcpy.RasterToNumPyArray("C:\old_extent.tif")
b = arcpy.NumPyArrayToRaster(a, arcpy.Point(x, y)) #x and y are your new lower left coordinates
b.save("C:\new_extent.tif")