Subdivision of geographic data is a panacea to problems you didn’t know you had.

Maybe you deal with vector data, so you pre-tile your vector data to ship to the browser to render– you’re makin’ smaller data. Maybe you use cutting edge PostGIS so you apply ST_Subdivide to keep your data smaller than the database page size like Paul Ramsey describes here. Smaller’s better… . Or perhaps you are forever reprojecting your data in strange ways, across problematic boundaries or need to buffer in an optimum coordinate system to avoid distortion. Regardless of the reason, smaller is better.

Maybe you aren’t doing vector work, but this time raster. What’s the equivalent tiling process?  I wrote about this for GeoServer almost 5 (eep!) years ago now (with a slightly more recent follow up) and much of what I wrote still applies:

• Pre-tile your raw data in modest chunks
• Use geotiff so you can use internal data structures to have even smaller tiles inside your tiles
• Create pyramids / pre-summarized data as tiles too.

Fortunately, while these posts were written for GeoServer, they apply to any tiler. Pre-process with gdal_retile.

gdal_retile.py -v -r bilinear -levels 4 -ps 6144 6144 -co "TILED=YES" -co "BLOCKXSIZE=256" -co "BLOCKYSIZE=256" -s_srs EPSG:3734 -targetDir aerial_2011 --optfile list.txt

Let’s break this down a little:

First we choose our resampling method for our pyramids (bilinear). Lanzcos would also be fine here.

-r bilinear

Next we set the number of resampling levels. This will depend on the size of the dataset.

-levels 4

Next we specify the pixel and line size of the output geotiff. This can be pretty large. We probably want to avoid a size that forces the use of bigtiff (i.e. 4GB).

-ps 6144 6144

Now we get into the geotiff data structure — we internally tile the tifs, and make them 256×256 pixels. We could also choose 512. We’re just aiming to have our tile size near to the size that we are going to send to the browser.

-co "TILED=YES" -co "BLOCKXSIZE=256" -co "BLOCKYSIZE=256"

Finally, we specify our coordinate system (this is state plane Ohio), our output directory (needs created ahead of time) and our input file list.

-s_srs EPSG:3734 -targetDir aerial_2011 --optfile list.txt


That’s it. Now you have a highly optimized raster dataset that can:

Pretty much any geospatial solution which uses GDAL can leverage this work to make for very fast rendering of raster data to a tile cache. If space is an issue, apply compression options that match your use case.