[GRASS-user] using grass on rasters without converting?

[Glynn Clements]

Markus Neteler wrote:

> > As a long time GIS user I've dipped into grass from time to time but never
> > in depth. One of the things that's deterred me is the fact that I have a
> > large body of data I work with (tens of gigabytes) and the prospect of
> > having to convert into grass, process it, and then flip it back out again is
> > unappealing.
> 
> Sure - also for us :) But it has been solved recently:
> 
> r.external - Link GDAL supported raster file to a binary raster map layer.
> http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/manuals/html64_user/r.external.html

However, this is only works for reading. Any maps created by GRASS are
still stored in the GRASS database, and need to be exported explicitly
with e.g. r.out.gdal.

Making it work for writing would require a way to obtain the various
creation options (i.e. file format, data format (UInt8, UInt16 etc),
output directory, probably a lot of other options). Implementation
shouldn't be hard, but specification and design might be.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>