ock size (tile width and height) used for overviews (internal or external) can be specified by setting the GDAL_TIFF_OVR_BLOCKSIZE environment variable to a power-of-two value between 64 and 4096. The default value is 128.
GDAL can deal with the following baseline TIFF tags as dataset-level metadata :
The name of the metadata item to use is one of the above names ("TIFFTAG_DOCUMENTNAME", ...).
Other non standard metadata items can be stored in a TIFF file created with the profile GDALGeoTIFF (the default, see below in the Creation issues section). Those metadata items are grouped together into a XML string stored in the non standard TIFFTAG_GDAL_METADATA ASCII tag (code 42112). When BASELINE or GeoTIFF profile are used, those non standard metadata items are stored into a PAM .aux.xml file.
The value of GDALMD_AREA_OR_POINT ("AREA_OR_POINT") metadata item is stored in the GeoTIFF key RasterPixelIsPoint for GDALGeoTIFF or GeoTIFF profiles.
Starting with GDAL 1.9.0, XMP metadata can be extracted from the file, and will be stored as XML raw content in the xml:XMP metadata domain.
Starting with GDAL 1.10, EXIF metadata can be extracted from the file, and will be stored the EXIF metadata domain.
Starting with GDAL 2.0, GDAL can deal with the following color profile metadata in the COLOR_PROFILE domain:
Note that these metadata properties can only be used on the original raw pixel data. If automatic conversion to RGB has been done, the color profile information cannot be used.
All these metadata tags can be overriden and/or used as creation options.
GDAL stores band nodata value in the non standard TIFFTAG_GDAL_NODATA ASCII tag (code 42113) for files created with the default profile GDALGeoTIFF. Note that all bands must use the same nodata value. When BASELINE or GeoTIFF profile are used, the nodata value is stored into a PAM .aux.xml file.
GeoTIFF files can be created with any GDAL defined band type, including the complex types. Created files may have any number of bands. Files with exactly 3 bands will be given a photometric interpretation of RGB, files with exactly four bands will have a photometric interpretation of RGBA, while all other combinations will have a photometric interpretation of MIN_IS_WHITE. Files with pseudo-color tables, or GCPs can currently only be created when creating from an existing GDAL dataset with those objects (GDALDriver::CreateCopy()).
Note that the GeoTIFF format does not support parametric description of datums, so TOWGS84 parameters in coordinate systems are lost in GeoTIFF format.
TFW=YES: Force the generation of an associated ESRI world file (.tfw).See a World Files section for details.
INTERLEAVE=[BAND,PIXEL]: By default TIFF files with pixel interleaving (PLANARCONFIG_CONTIG in TIFF terminology) are created. These are slightly less efficient than BAND interleaving for some purposes, but some applications only support pixel interleaved TIFF files.
TILED=YES: By default stripped TIFF files are created. This option can be used to force creation of tiled TIFF files.
BLOCKXSIZE=n: Sets tile width, defaults to 256.
BLOCKYSIZE=n: Set tile or strip height. Tile height defaults to 256, strip height defaults to a value such that one strip is 8K or less.
NBITS=n: Create a file with less than 8 bits per sample by passing a value from 1 to 7. The apparent pixel type should be Byte. From GDAL 1.6.0, values of n=9...15 (UInt16 type) and n=17...31 (UInt32 type) are also accepted.
COMPRESS=[JPEG/LZW/PACKBITS/DEFLATE/CCITTRLE/CCITTFAX3/CCITTFAX4/NONE]: Set the compression to use. JPEG should generally only be used with Byte data (8 bit per channel). But starting with GDAL 1.7.0 and provided that GDAL is built with internal libtiff and libjpeg, it is possible to read and write TIFF files with 12bit JPEG compressed TIFF files (seen as UInt16 bands with NBITS=12). See the "8 and 12 bit JPEG in TIFF" wiki page for more details. The CCITT compression should only be used with 1bit (NBITS=1) data. None is the default.
PREDICTOR=[1/2/3]: Set the predictor for LZW or DEFLATE compression. The default is 1 (no predict