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My geoscientists like to work with MapInfo and ArcGIS. I require a common 1 band raster format that can hold obscene amounts of data without damaging the data (compression). I have tried .tif and found it to be rather unhappy once it's starts to gain a few GB. I'm now inclined to move to .ers Question 1: What universal analytical raster is best?

In this particular case we have CSIRO file geodatabase rasters (around 7GB uncompressed). I can not see them directly with: ERDAS ER Mapper, or ERDAS Imagine, nor MapInfo Professional 12.5+ (with the fgdb api). Therefore I need to bring them out to an intermediate raster so I can export them to .ers or ecw with ERDAS. Question 2: What intermediate raster is best?

So far ArcGIS exports to massive .tif has failed as a universal analytic raster and intermediate raster. I'm now testing the Esri grid. Does anyone have good advice?

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    Slice it and keep as mosaic
    – FelixIP
    Commented Apr 24, 2015 at 3:49
  • Yeah I thought about sub-setting it (even as an intermediate). But that does not suit the geoscientists.
    – GISI
    Commented Apr 24, 2015 at 3:52
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    I've worked with terabyte+ sized GeoTIFFs before. Please expand on why you think they get unhappy :(... What issues did you have? Did you use compression? Did you ensure they were saved in "BIGTIFF" format? How were you creating them?
    – user2856
    Commented Apr 24, 2015 at 4:53
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    The biggest problem I've had with TIFF/GeoTIFF/BigTIFF is with tags that some software has issues with whist others cope or ignore.. The non-existence of a NoData tag is just one example (most software respects the GDALNODATA tag as proxy, but not all) and spatial reference embedding are a few of the big ones. There is no guarantee that a TIFF file (irrespective of size) will be readable by all GIS packages... then there's compression, LZ77 is used by Esri but some software doesn't understand it... @Luke, if you keep it to Arc you wont have a problem until you want to share it around.
    – Michael Stimson
    Commented Apr 24, 2015 at 5:24
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    @GISI I doubt you'll be able to get MapInfo Pro/Discover to read 32bit GeoTIFF files. It's the 32bit that is causing MapInfo Pro problems. We aren't supporting these until we release the 64bit MapInfo Pro Raster add-on within the next month and Discover won't have this capability until later this year when the 64bit release is ready. Currently I would recommend the ERMapper Grid (ers) or maybe the GeoSoft (grd) format. But to be honest I haven't worked with 10+ GB files in these formats yet
    – Peter Horsbøll Møller
    Commented Apr 24, 2015 at 6:45

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