In January we increased the file upload limit for imagery from 260 MB to 4 GB. Now, we're increasing the limit on TIFF files again, to 10 GB. This allows you to upload even more detailed satellite and drone imagery to your Mapbox account making it easier to publish imagery from government sources, commerical imagery providers, and drone flights.
We increased this limit by adding support for BigTIFFs, a special flavor of the TIFF format that uses 64-bit offsets to far exceed the 4 GB file size limit that normal TIFFs have.
Spanning over 20 square miles, this image shows the mediterranean city of Montpellier, France at 16 cm resolution. This set of open data, captured just last year, is provided by the City of Montpellier. View full screen map.
Here are a few examples of what you can upload with the new 10 GB limit:
- All of Paris, France at 60 cm resolution from Digital Globe
- A 50,000 acre farm at 5 meter resolution from RapidEye
- Drone footage of Machu Picchu at 10 cm resolution
- Beautiful imagery of Zhangjiajie National Forest Park at 1 meter resolution
- 10,000,000 olympic sized trampolines imaged at a 20 cm resolution
You can create a BigTIFF using the command line raster utility, `gdal_translate` (using GDAL version >= 1.5.0).
gdal_translate -of GTiff -co BIGTIFF=YES -co TILED=YES -co COMPRESS=LZW original.jp2 bigtiff.tif- The `-of` flag stands for "output format". The above command is setting the output to GeoTIFF.
- The `-co` flag stands for "creation option". The above command is passing the BIGTIFF option to the output format driver to create a BigTIFF. The TILED command breaks the image up into square tiles. Pre-cutting high-res imagery into tiles can make accessing and processing that image more efficient. Also, the COMPRESS command helps decrease the overall filesize.
Questions? You can contact me on Twitter @carolbirgitta or email help@mapbox.com.