How can I clip multiple geotiff tiles with a shapefile without greatly increasing their size?

Question

I'm using gdalwarp to clip a number of geotiffs (tiles of a larger map) to a polygon described by a shapefile (which is about the size of the overall map, i.e. much larger than individual tiles) using:

gdalwarp -of GTiff -cutline shape.shp -crop_to_cutline tile.tif cropped_tile.tif

(where tile.tif actually iterates through all the map tiles in the full code)

This works fine, however the resulting tiles (cropped_tile*.tif) now cover the same geographic area as the shapefile, and consequently have much larger file sizes (2.5M -> 64M). Is there any way to clip the areas of the tiles which lie outside the polygon in the shapefile without making each tile cover the same area as the shapefile itself?

Answer 1

If your geotiffs are increasing so much in size it almost certainly means that the originals are compressed. With your current command the cropped files are uncompressed.

You can check the compression method which is used in your original images with gdalinfo http://www.gdal.org/gdalinfo.html. Use the same or select your favourite compression from http://www.gdal.org/frmt_gtiff.html and add creation option -co compress= into your gdalwarp command. However, notice that some compression methods do not suit well for warping big images which are written incrementally into destination file. Especially with jpeg compression the compression rate will not be optimal that way and it is better to create first an uncompressed image with gdalwarp and compress it with gdal_translate later.