[gdal-dev] Anyone has already forgotten the /vsicurl/ prefix?

[Daniel Evans]

Hi Even,

Taking the example for my own typical use case, S3, it'd be great if GDAL
understood the standard s3:// prefix, rather than having to add "is this
URL going to GDAL? If so convert it into the special GDAL form" lines
throughout my codebase. I therefore fully support the idea of doing it for
any widely used protocols.

Kudos to rasterio for usually doing that effort for me, but I recently did
have to drop down to GDAL and got tripped up again.

Cheers,
Daniel


On Fri, 27 Mar 2026, 17:08 Even Rouault via gdal-dev, <
gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I suspect that almost every GDAL user, even the most experienced, has
> made the mistake of typing "gdalinfo https://example.com/my.tif" instead
> of "gdalinfo /vsicurl/https://example.com/my.tif". Both commands work,
> but the first one triggers the HTTP pseudo-driver which downloads the
> entire file into memory before passing it to the GeoTIFF driver, while
> the second reads it in chunks.
>
> I would be inclined to modify the GDALOpen() logic with the following
> tweak: if the passed filename starts with "http://" or "https://",
> automatically prepend "/vsicurl/", unless the string has query
> parameters. That restriction about not having query parameters is
> because in most of the cases this is for dynamically generated resources
> that don't support range requests.
>
> For users really wanting to go through the HTTP pseudo-driver, we'd
> modify it to accept a "HTTP:" prefix before the URL or it would trigger
> if using the "-if HTTP" argument of command line utilities (or
> allowed_drivers = ["HTTP"] in the API)
>
> So this change wouldn't be fully backwards compatible, but I feel it
> would still make more people happy than unhappy.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Even
>
> --
> http://www.spatialys.com
> My software is free, but my time generally not.
>
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