The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Geospatial Raster Data

Everything you need to know about raster files, georeferencing, metadata and Rasterio Python library

Photo by Daniele Colucci on Unsplash

Most aerial photographs and imagery from satellites are raster files.
This format is often used to represent real-world phenomena. If you are working with geographic data, there is a high chance you have to deal with it.

To use geographical raster files with Python, different theoretical concepts are required. Before jumping to the programmatic part, I highly recommend you follow the introductory sections.

Table of content

1. Introduction: first concepts.
2. Applications: where are rasters used?
3. Colormap: discrete and continuous colormaps to visualize rasters.
4. Georeferencing: CRS and Affine Transformations.
5. Raster’s metadata: all the data associated with rasters.
6. Rasterio: read, save, georeference and visualize raster files in Python.

Introduction

A raster consists of a matrix of cells (or pixels) organized into rows and columns where each cell…