[Qgis-user] Raster data formats

[Juan Pedro Pérez Alcántara]

Hello,

perhaps this is a silly one, but I'm quite frustrated with conversions
from popular raster formats in the Windows/ArcGIS world to the
Linux/QGIS one. For example, ECW and MrSID are most popular. I think
JPEG2000 should be a good candidate for a raster format in QGIS. As far
as I know, it is fast (piramidized by nature, so to say),
georreferenced, and they work flawlessly and smoothly (my experience, at
least) in QGIS. Perhaps all of you, much experienced than me for sure,
think that JPEG2000 is not the way and that GeoTIFF or whatever should
do the job. If it is so, I'll stick obviously to that option instead.

I have been messing around with quite a bunch of libraries to deal with
the conversion. First, there is GDAL, with which I'm able to transform
ECW to almost any GeoTIFF or JPEG that works with QGIS very well, and
with JPEG compression, not so far in size from the ECW source. But then
I tried to use ImageMagick and/or Jasper to convert to JPEG2000, and
here is where I get stuck. I stripped off in gdal_translate the GeoTIFF
tags with BASELINE, but to no avail in ImageMagick, it says always (with
TIFF, JPEG, etc.) that it cannot write the image. Same with JASPER: I
tried to convert from a gdal_translated jpeg, but without result. What
is that I'm missing? Do you have a proven workflow to do this job? 

And with MrSID... not experimented by now, but I tremble only thinking
in that :)

Perhaps I'm too obsessed with size (file sizes, I mean!!! :) ), and I'm
messing around too much with that subject, when GeoTIFF is providing
good results with a slight size increase. Given the size of hard drives
today (and that I'm not in the massive storage business in the GIS
scene), I think is a fair trade-off for an easy and straightforward
conversion workflow. I'd like very much to hear your opinions about
this.

Thanks in advance, this is my first post. QGIS is great and thanks to it
and we have almost left behind the so-called industrial standard in GIS.
Congratulations for the great job.

Greetings from Spain,

Juan Pedro Pérez Alcántara