from Hacker News

Learning About the GeoTIFF File Format with a Hex Editor (2018)

by oldpatricka on 5/5/21, 4:42 PM with 18 comments

• by kylebarron on 5/5/21, 5:30 PM

  This is a good hex editor overview, but also the part about Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs is quite good. In the past couple of years COGs have really revolutionized the satellite imagery industry. Even USGS has seen this is the future and publishes the official Landsat data in Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF format [0].

  I've been leveraging COGs recently to quickly bring satellite imagery into the browser for analysis [1].

  [0]: https://www.usgs.gov/core-science-systems/nli/landsat/landsa...

  [1]: https://www.unfolded.ai/blog/2021-04-28-raster-layer/

• by punnerud on 5/5/21, 5:27 PM

  Could we build a static “Google Maps” using really big GeoTIFF files and downloading part of them with the section of a file functionality.

  Just like the SQLite example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27025829

• by darekkay on 5/5/21, 8:30 PM

  I recently did something similar with Foobar 2000's playlist format [1]. It was a fun learning experience :)

  [1] https://darekkay.com/blog/foobar2000-playlist-index-format/

• by ivanhoe on 5/5/21, 5:24 PM

  speaking of this, what hex editor would community recommend for examining (potentially quite large) binaries?