Adding customised data into geotiff

Question

Not too familiar with the geotiff format and hence would like to raise a query on whether I could embed additional information data into geotiff metadata section?

Is the fields type for geotiff fixed? or is there any allowance for customised propriteary data to be included?

Thanks

Answer 1

TIFF (and hence GeoTIFF) are extensible. In fact that is how GeoTIFF is done - its a set of extra tags. GDAL writes extra GeoTIFF tags (see http://www.gdal.org/frmt_gtiff.html for the PROFILE settings).

If using something like lib(geo)tiff, you'd just call TIFFSetField with your tag value as the second argument. You can provide libtiff with more hints on complex data structures if needed - see http://www.remotesensing.org/libtiff/addingtags.html (note: behaviour before libtiff 3.6.0 was different).