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I'm looking for a tool or a plug-in for QGIS that would allow me to shift rasters to new coordinates. An equivalent of "Shift" tool in ArcGIS would be the best option.

I know I can edit the world file that comes along with the raster to do this, but some raster formats (like GeoTIFF) contain their metadata inside their binary format.

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4 Answers 4

Reset to default
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The Rasmover plugin should do what you want.

You have to allow for experimental plugins to get it in the plugin list.

The result is a virtual raster file, which you can edit with a text editor to adjust the parameters if needed.

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  • Thanks, it's not exactly what I had in mind, but this actually works. You can later save the edited vrt as a normal, standalone raster. I wish this plugin had a dialog window where you could input new coordinates.
    – pg85
    Commented Jan 28, 2015 at 7:56
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I just used this in R and it solved the problem.

Page 195 from https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/raster/raster.pdf (use table of contents for quick access)

r <- raster()
r <- shift(r, dx=1, dy=-1)

Edit 1: Updated the link

Edit 2: Updated for package changes in 2.9-22 (https://github.com/rspatial/raster/issues/66)

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  • Link is broken - please update
    – Justin Kray
    Commented Feb 1, 2019 at 5:20
  • Updated from official R docs. (Glad it's still being used!)
    – dTanMan
    Commented Feb 20, 2019 at 10:29
  • That's nice but it is not QGIS as the asker specified?
    – bugmenot123
    Commented Aug 9, 2022 at 6:50
  • ...you know, you're right haha. Forgive my internship-era answer! But yeah It did help me before, so I just put it in.
    – dTanMan
    Commented Mar 7, 2023 at 16:13
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For this job I am satisfied with QGIS plugin Freehand Raster Georeferencer. Allows these simple operations in an user friendly GUI: Move, Rotate, Scale, Adjust sides, 2 Points referencer.

Final export consists of three files: TIF, WorldFile (.tfw) and additional information (e.g. projection, etc.) into auxiliary file (.aux.xml).

I usually merge three files into a GeoTIFF e.g. with GDAL. I also strongly recommend to apply some compression method (the result from the Plugin is uncompressed), e.g.

gdal_translate -of GTiff -co COMPRESS=DEFLATE input.tif output.tif

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  • 3
    The plugin is not outputing a tif file. Only tfw.
    – wondim
    Commented Jun 16, 2021 at 5:40
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Besides the already existing answers, it can be done with gdal_translate, using the command line option a_ullr (see documentation).

With a_ullr you can specify the new upper-left and lower-right coordinates of the raster, so for example if the raster extent as seen in "Properties" is "100,400:300,200", then to shift by +1 unit in x and +2 units in y the command becomes:

gdal_translate -a_ullr 101 402 301 202 input.tif output.tif

gdal_translate can be accessed from the QGIS processing pane and "-a_ullr 101 402 301 202" can be input under "Additional command line arguments".

The method was previously described in "Applying a simple X,Y shift or translation to a raster GeoTIFF file using GDAL ".

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