Easy methods of installing and having access to the GDAL library?

Question

The GDAL library homepage implies that people who arrive there already know what they are doing. I work with ArcGIS, and am unfamiliar with intricate setups with library dependencies as GDAL suggests. Is there an easy "package" i can download? I have found maptools.org, and i guess the libraries that has is accessible by any programming language of choice? I also found QGIS which apparently uses GDAL.

I am looking into GDAL because it has functionality that ArcGIS does not. My language of choice is python. What is my best (and easieist) route to take here??

thanks!

Answer 1

The easiest option is probably to use the OSGeo4W (for Windows) installer. With this you can select GDAL from a large list of OpenSource GIS tools. Under "libs" select the version of GDAL you want. To add Python support select gdal**-python making sure the versions match. You can uncheck anything else (except I think you need Python-numpy which is selected by default):

http://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/

Then check out some of the sample Python / GDAL scripts at:

http://svn.osgeo.org/gdal/trunk/gdal/swig/python/samples/

More GDAL Python details here:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/GDAL/

Other Options

Take a look at http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/DownloadingGdalBinaries

You can run the set up package in the zip here (there doesn't seem to be a 1.7 version out yet):

http://download.osgeo.org/gdal/win32/1.6/gdalwin32exe160.zip

A smaller collection of tools can be found here (FW is for Frank Warmerdam the creator/maintainer of GDAL):

http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/FWTools

Answer 2

If you want to add a ready-made GIS to your python/GDAL code, Quantum GIS (Qgis) has an embedded python interpreter and a full python API. You can write plugins for Qgis in python, and use GDAL functions for raster data. Qgis is in the osgeo4w system.