Examples of ogr2ogr for geospatial manipulation

ogr2ogr is the swiss army knife in the world of geospatial analysis and data processing. It's main purpose is to convert geospatial data to different dataformats without the need of Geographic Information Systems such as QGIS or ArcPro. It also allows us to do various operations during this process. We can reproject our data; clip it; make a sub selection of data or attributes; intersect it; change column names and much more.

Clone the repository to experiment with the data used in the commands below.

For an in depth walkthrough vist my blogpost on ogr2ogr

Convert data from ESRI Shapefile to Geopackage

ogr2ogr -f 'GPKG' project_extent.gpkg project_extent_wgs.shp

• ogr2ogr basically tells the computer: get ready, I want to use ogr2ogr.
• -f 'GPKG' specify the format to which we want to convert our shapefile.
• project_extent.gpkg is the output file.
• project_extent_wgs.shp is our input file.

Reproject data

ogr2ogr -f 'GPKG' project_extent_rdnew.gpkg project_extent_wgs.shp -t_srs EPSG:28992

Clip data using another layer

ogr2ogr -f 'GPKG' clipped/clip_buildings.gpkg buildings.gpkg -clipsrc project_extent_rdnew.gpkg -progress

• ogr2ogr tell computer you are about to use ogr2ogr.
• -f 'GPKG' specify the output format.
• clipped/clip_buildings.gpkg specify output file and destination. In our case we wish to save result in a subfolder clipped/.
• buildings.gpkg is our input file.
• -clipsrc the clip operations we wish to apply using another file.
• project_extent_rdnew.gpkg the file containing the clip features. In our case our reprojected neighborhood.
• -progress and show us a progress bar.