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I know that it is possible to extract vector data from .gdb's. I have found some similar questions here and here or even here on StackExchange, but they were either not exactly what I was looking for or really old where the answer was, that QGIS cannot read raster data from file geodatabases.

It is 2019 now and 3.6.2 was just released. Is it now possible to open raster data from file geodatabases with QGIS? Or at least a way to check whether the geodatabase even contains raster data without having any ESRI products?

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  • No changes to the Esri FileGDB API. This is a duplicate of your unreferenced similar question.
    – Vince
    May 23, 2019 at 10:02
  • put in links to "similar questions". What does your first sentence mean? "No, it is not possible." or something else?
    – The Dude
    May 24, 2019 at 7:10

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So I found the answer myself. I opened up the file geodatabase with ArcGIS and saw that it indeed contained raster datasets. So the answer is: Even the new QGIS completely ignores raster datasets when opening a file geodatabase. You wouldn't even know whether or not the GDB contains such data if you are not able to open it with ArcGIS. Very unfortunate.

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The functionality to handle File GDB raster datasets was recently added to GDAL, so it would be possible to export any raster dataset to e.g. GeoTIFF with gdal_translate and put those into QGIS.

If the GDB only has one raster dataset, you can simply run gdal_translate YourFile.gdb output.tiff to get the file.

If it has more, or you only want to check whether it contains raster data, you can run gdalinfo YourFile.gdb to get the list of raster layers, given as SUBDATASET_n_NAME first. The names are actually the full string to then pass to gdal_translate to specify which layer to extract, and they look like OpenFileGDB:"YourFile.gdb":raster_layer_name.

After this you can run gdal_translate OpenFileGDB:"YourFile.gdb":raster_layer_name output.tiff and it should produce the result.

One remark: If it contains only one raster layer, GDAL seems to not output those in the metadata by name at all. But it will still output some meaningful information. As far as I expierienced it, gdalinfo gives an error if there are no raster datasets.

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