[Landsat-pds] COG Format discussion

[Vincent Sarago]

Sorry for hijacking this mailing list but as Landsat dataset is one of the biggest open COG dataset, discussion about the evolution of the format here made sense to us.

Couple weeks ago we started a discussion internally about COGEO format. It’s great to see how many people are using and implementing COG right now (e.g planet, digitalglobe…) that’s say we think there is still place for improvement. 

Here are some of our ideas:
- add webp compression to libtiff. Even if webp wasn’t a big success in term of adoption, the format is still a good option in comparison to JPEG and PNG. 
- Improve mask storing inside COG. For some technical reason, when you create a COG with internal masking, the mask is appended to the end of the IFD. Some of improvement could be to append mask TILE data just after the imagery tile data.

we’d love to hear story or comments from people about the format and how they see it moving in the future.