I’m a vector guy, I love nodes and even lines that connect nodes. Don’t even get me started on polygons! But rasters are still very much part of my life. I’ve used FME quite a bit to manipulate them because of it’s speed and lack of “legacy” COM madness. But even it has overhead that I don’t want all the time. I’ve written quite a bit about Fiona and how it really simplifies vector workflows so you better believe I sat up when I saw Sean’s announcement of Rasterio.
Ever since I wrote Fiona, I’ve been asked if I have plans to do something similar for geospatial raster data. Having been out of the raster business for a few years, I always said “no serious plans, just blue-sky ideas.” Today, I’m back in satellite image processing and very much want and need something like Fiona-for-rasters. Rasterio is my attempt to write such a Python package.
You’ll remember that Sean joined MapBox a couple months ago and clearly he’s been working on their cloudless satellite efforts. I’m sure the first thing he needed was better tools for manipulating raster images. If you use GDAL you’ll be really excited about Rasterio. Like OGR is to Fiona, GDAL is to Rasterio. Plus if your a NumPy user (if you aren’t, you should be) you can read rasters right into your NumPy arrays. Let that sink in for a moment. I’m so looking forward to the 4 day holiday weekend to start playing with Rasterio.