Supported Raster/Reference Formats

Adobe Geospatial PDF, TerraGo GeoPDF® (pdf)

The geospatial PDF is considered an Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (following the PDF 1.7 specification) that contains information that is required to georeference location data. It is an open specification developed and maintained by Adobe Systems. See detailed specifications in Section 8.3 at Acrobat Developer Resources — Acrobat Developer Docs . The TerraGo GeoPDF is a proprietary format that is compatible with Geographic Imager, but with limitations.

The Adobe PDF file format cannot reference non-PDF images; it can only reference other PDF images.

Since the discontinued support of 3D features by Photoshop, we no longer support 3D PDFs within Geographic Imager.  For more information on this, please see the link here.

BigTIFF (tif, tiff)

BigTIFF extends the original TIFF file format specification to support 64-bit (for images larger than 4 GB). It is the result of work by a variety of parties including Adobe Systems. BigTIFF is expected to be useful for people and vendors that are confronted with unusually large images and still seek to use an open, simple, and extendable format. BigTIFF is not yet an official standard and is still awaiting final approval. BigTIFF writer includes advanced control to adjust TIFF block size (default 256 for both width and height) and scripting is supported.

BSB (kap)

The BSB file format is a compressed raster format used for distributing raster nautical charts by various organizations in North America, most notably the NOAA. KAP file contains the content/image and the BSB file contains text information about the image. A BSB file can store many control points and should be referenced with Georeference prior to use.

ENVI Raster (hdr, dat)

The ENVI image format is a flat-binary raster file with an accompanying ASCII header file. The data are stored as a binary stream of bytes in one of the following formats, often referred to as the interleave type: BSQ (Band Sequential), BIP (Band-interleaved-by-pixel) or BIL (Band-interleaved-by-line). The header file (HDR) is an ASCII file containing the metadata associated with the binary file, and is needed to load the binary data.

ERDAS IMAGINE Raster (img)

ERDAS IMAGINE uses IMG files to store raster data. These files use the ERDAS IMAGINE Hierarchal File Format (HFA) structure. A tiled format is used to store raster layers. This allows raster layers to be displayed and resampled quickly. Each raster layer within an IMG file has its own ancillary data, including the following parameters: height and width (rows and columns), layer type (continuous or thematic), data type, compression, and lock size.

Enhanced Compression Wavelet (ecw)

ECW is a proprietary wavelet compression image format optimized for aerial and satellite imagery. It was originally developed by Earth Resource Mapping. The lossy compression format efficiently compresses very large images with fine alternating contrast. 

 Not currently supported on Apple Silicon machines

GeoPackage (gpkg)

A GeoPackage is a platform-independent SQLite database file that contains GeoPackage data and metadata tables, with specified definitions, integrity assertions, format limitations and content constraints. While a GeoPackage can contain vector feature data, Geographic Imager currently only supports tile matrix pyramid tile images.

 Transparency is supported with PNG for GeoPackages.

 Alpha channels will not be maintained with GeoPackages.

 Bit depth for both RGB, CMYK and Grayscale are all only 8-bit.

GeoTIFF File (tif, tiff)

Tagged Image File Format (TIFF or TIF) is a common raster graphic file format and one of the most common geospatial image formats (in the form of GeoTIFF). A GeoTIFF is a TIFF file with embedded geographic information such as position and scale in world coordinates, affine transformation or an explicit list of control points. Many raster geographic images from GIS systems are stored in this format.

Unlike other georeferenced image formats discussed in this section, a GeoTIFF does not require a separate reference file. Geographic information is automatically detected when a GeoTIFF is opened in Geographic Imager. When saving a georeferenced image to the TIF or TIFF format, Geographic Imager writes the appropriate georeference header information into the file. It also supports storage of coordinate system information and control points.

Supported projections when saving a coordinate system to GeoTIFF:

Albers Equal-Area Conic Azimuthal Equidistant Cassini-Soldner Cylindrical Equal Area Eckert IV Eckert VI Equidistant Conic Equidistant Cylindrical Equirectangular Gall Stereographic Gnomonic Hotine Oblique Mercator Laborde Oblique Mercator

Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area Lambert Conic Conformal (1SP) Lambert Conic Conformal (2SP) Lambert Conic Conformal (2SP Belgium) Lambert Cylindrical Equal Area Mercator Miller Cylindrical Mollweide New Zealand Map Grid Oblique Mercator Oblique Stereographic Orthographic Polar Stereographic

Polyconic Robinson Rosenmund Oblique Mercator Sinusoidal Stereographic Swiss Oblique Cylindrical Swiss Oblique Mercator Transverse Mercator Transverse Mercator (modified Alaska) Transverse Mercator (South Oriented) Tunisia Mining Grid VanDerGrinten

 

 Geographic Imager supports every coordinate system it can write, regardless of projection. However, this does not guarantee that a third-party GIS software will recognize all coordinate systems or projections.

 When a GeoTIFF contains rotation or the coordinate system direction is reversed, it may not open in legacy applications.

 Images in a multichannel color mode are not supported when using Save or Quick Save To Format to save to GeoTIFF. Saving layers and extra channels is supported.

 It is recommended to open 12-bit TIFF images with Advanced Import, otherwise it will not open.

JPEG 2000 (jp2, j2k, jpx, jpc, j2c, jpf)

JPEG 2000 is a wavelet-based image compression standard. It was created by the Joint Photographic Experts Group committee in the year 2000 with the intention of superseding their original discrete cosine transform-based JPEG standard (created 1992). The standardized filename extension is JP2 for ISO/IEC 15444-1 conforming files and JPX for the extended part-2 specifications, published as ISO/IEC 15444-2, while the MIME type is image/JP2.

 Adobe Photoshop can only save JPEG 2000 files less than 2 GB in size.

Not currently available on Apple Silicon machines.

LizardTech MrSID* and MrSID/MG4 LiDAR (sid)

Multi-resolution Seamless Image Database (MrSID) is a powerful wavelet-based image compressor, viewer and file format for large raster images. Developed by LizardTech Inc., MrSID enables instantaneous viewing and manipulation of images locally and over networks. Features include high and efficient compression ratios while maintaining true multiple resolutions, selective decompression, seamless mosaicking and browsing. Files in the MrSID/MG4 compressed LiDAR file can be opened and viewed as a raster DEM.

 To write MrSID files through Geographic Imager, GeoExpress must also be installed (unavailable with a trial GeoExpress license). * Write ability for MrSID on Windows only.

Not currently available on Apple Silicon machines.

NITF (ntf)

The National Imagery Transmission Format (NITF) data format is widely used by geospatial analysts in the defense and intelligence communities. The NITF format contains imagery and associated metadata in a single file.

PCI EASI/PACE (pix)

PCIDSK database files are used by PCI EASI/PACE software for image analysis. All pixel data types, and data organizations (pixel interleaved, band interleaved, file interleaved and tiled) should be supported, but compressed PCIDSK files are not supported. Currently LUT and PCT segments are ignored. Overall file, and band specific metadata should be correctly associated with the image or bands. Georeferencing is supported though there may be some limitations in support of datums and ellipsoids. If control point segments are present, the first will be used, and the rest ignored. Internal overview (pyramid) images will also be correctly read though newly requested overviews will be built externally as an OVR file.

SGI Image Format (rgb, rgba, int, inta, bw)

The SGI image file format is part of the SGI image library found on Silicon Graphics machines. The driver currently supports 1, 2, 3, and 4 band images. The driver currently supports "8 bit per channel value" images. The driver supports both uncompressed and run-length encoded (RLE) images for reading, but created files are always RLE compressed. The *.rgba, *.int, *.inta, and *.bw extensions are supported since Geographic Imager 5.0.

Web Map Service

Web Map Service is an interface standard designed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) for GIS raster data transactions through http protocol. The Geographic Imager WMS import connects to servers that use version 1.1.1 of the OGC standard. WMS data formats include TIFF, GIF, PNG, and JPEG. See Advanced Import.