The 20 GDAL/OGR Commands I Use Every Week

GDAL powers nearly every geospatial workflow on the planet—QGIS, PostGIS, GeoPandas, and Rasterio all depend on it. These 20 commands handle format conversion, reprojection, spatial filtering, and data inspection for both vector (ogrinfo/ogr2ogr) and raster (gdalinfo/gdal_translate/gdalwarp) data.

Verify Your GDAL Version

GDAL 3.5+ added GeoParquet support. GDAL 3.8+ supports GeoParquet 2.0 with bbox covering. Check your version first—format support varies significantly across releases.

# Check installed versions
ogrinfo --version
gdalinfo --version
ogr2ogr --version
gdal_translate --version

Vector Data: ogrinfo + ogr2ogr

OGR handles vector data—points, lines, polygons, and their attributes across 80+ formats. Two commands cover most workflows: ogrinfo for inspection and ogr2ogr for conversion, reprojection, and SQL-based filtering.

8 Most-Used Vector Formats

• GeoJSON, GeoJSONSeq
• GPKG (GeoPackage)
• ESRI Shapefile
• PostgreSQL/PostGIS
• FlatGeobuf
• Parquet (GeoParquet)
• KML, GML
• CSV with geometry

Inspecting Vector Data

# List supported vector formats
ogrinfo --formats

# Get basic info about a vector file
ogrinfo sample.geojson

# Get summary info for a specific layer (-so = summary only)
ogrinfo -so sample.geojson layer_name

# List all layers in a file
ogrinfo -al -so sample.gpkg

Converting Vector Data

# List available output formats
ogr2ogr --formats

# Convert GeoJSON to GeoPackage
ogr2ogr -f GPKG output.gpkg input.geojson

# Convert Shapefile to GeoJSON
ogr2ogr -f GeoJSON output.geojson input.shp

# Convert to GeoParquet
ogr2ogr -f Parquet output.parquet input.geojson

# Reproject during conversion (to WGS84)
ogr2ogr -f GeoJSON -t_srs EPSG:4326 output.geojson input.shp

# Filter features with SQL
ogr2ogr -f GeoJSON -sql "SELECT * FROM layer WHERE pop > 10000" output.geojson input.gpkg

Raster Data: gdalinfo + gdal_translate + gdalwarp

GDAL handles raster data—satellite imagery, DEMs, aerial photos—across 150+ formats. gdalinfo inspects metadata, gdal_translate converts between formats (including COG), and gdalwarp handles reprojection and resampling.

6 Most-Used Raster Formats

• GeoTIFF, COG (Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF)
• JPEG, PNG, WEBP
• NetCDF, HDF5
• Zarr
• MBTiles, PMTiles
• VRT (Virtual Raster)

Inspecting Raster Data

# List supported raster formats
gdalinfo --formats

# Get info about a raster file
gdalinfo sample.tif

# Get just the coordinate system
gdalinfo -proj4 sample.tif

# Get stats (min, max, mean, stddev)
gdalinfo -stats sample.tif

Converting Raster Data

# Convert GeoTIFF to PNG
gdal_translate -of PNG input.tif output.png

# Convert to Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG)
gdal_translate -of COG input.tif output_cog.tif

# Convert with compression
gdal_translate -of GTiff -co COMPRESS=LZW input.tif output.tif

# Clip raster to bounding box
gdal_translate -projwin xmin ymax xmax ymin input.tif output.tif

# Resample to different resolution
gdalwarp -tr 10 10 input.tif output_10m.tif

Command Pattern: *info Inspects, *2* Converts

GDAL follows a consistent naming convention: *info commands inspect data, *2* commands convert between formats. Both support --formats to list all available drivers.

• ogrinfo — Inspect vector datasets
• ogr2ogr — Convert vector data between formats
• gdalinfo — Inspect raster datasets
• gdal_translate — Convert raster data between formats
• gdalwarp — Reproject and resample rasters