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I have tifs and with help from this community I have been able to navigate them with gdal, rasterio, geopandas etc. I also understand that they encode raster data. But I am not sure what additional metadata is encoded in them.

Is there some way for me to browse through the metadata and make this information more human readable in python?

I would like to leverage this metadata in an ML problem, but I don't just want to throw it into a neural network to figure it out.

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    Other than asking the creator for more specific information about these data you could use gdalinfo to read the infomation stored in the TIFF. gdal.org/programs/gdalinfo.html
    – GBG
    Commented Dec 6, 2021 at 16:41
  • @GBG thanks, this seems like the most straightforward way to me!
    – Oliver
    Commented Dec 7, 2021 at 8:35

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1- One way is contacting the developer/owner/project manager/scientist who puts the .tif files online.

2- Another way is to read the .tif description (some kind of internal metadata that is available via .tif format.

3- Is to locate the bounds and look at its aerial/satellite images and speculate what it might be.

4- If your raster is accompanied by an *.hdr or readme.txt, open them in a text viewer and you'll possibly find all the information

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  • thank you very much for this list, 1 I did it's a 3rd party so we didn't get far. 2) how do I read the .tif description? 3) I am doing this right now and feel a little lost. 4) unfortunately no such file.
    – Oliver
    Commented Dec 7, 2021 at 8:14
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    Open the .tif in any GIS software, then right-click on the .tif layer -> properties. Under meta-data or something similar you will typically find a lot!
    – Ash
    Commented Dec 7, 2021 at 9:46
  • Oh, I see, so there likely isn't much here then: i.imgur.com/BSVzW9G.png ? I'm using QGIS.
    – Oliver
    Commented Dec 7, 2021 at 15:16
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I like to use 'pyexiftool' for this particular case, which is a python wrapper for the useful program 'exiftool': http://smarnach.github.io/pyexiftool/

It has built in functionality to handle multiple images, which will be handy for you when mining for ML inputs.

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  • Hi, thanks, this looks very useful, I haven't gotten it to work fully yet though
    – Oliver
    Commented Dec 7, 2021 at 8:27

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