Running script over every file in folder using GDAL in Python?

Question

I'm using GDAL to calculate NDVI mean and max and to find other information about .tif Landsat images acquired from Earth Explorer. I stacked the bands into a single .tif image and have a working python script to find everything I want to know about the image, however I have many .tif files and I don't want to run the script individually for each file, and I want to make my script automatically run the code over every .tif file I have in the same folder.

The beginning of my script, and how I am accessing the single .tif file looks like this:

from __future__ import print_function

from osgeo import gdal

print("GDAL's version is: " + gdal.__version__)

print (gdal)

print(gdal.GDT_Byte)

dataset = gdal.Open('/Path/To/Folder/Containing/.tif', gdal.GA_ReadOnly)

How would I get Python to run the script over every file in this folder automatically?

Answer 1

The python module glob is used to get all file names according to the pattern that you give it. The documentation for glob can be found here.

Within your script you would use glob like this:

in_directory = r'C:\Data'
files_to_process = glob.glob(os.path.join(in_directory, '*.tif')
for data_path in files_to_process:
    raster_dataset = gdal.Open(data_path, gdal.GA_ReadOnly)
    #do your processing on the raster dataset here

In the snippet above the * is a wildcard to match any string and the .tif is static, so this will match all files that end with .tif. glob.glob returns a list of all files that match your criteria. You can then loop over each filename in the list returned by glob. In addition to wildcard matching you can also use regular expressions. glob is a very useful module for batch processing and is part of the Python Standard Library, e.g. it is automatically shipped with Python.