(United States) USGS topo drg on Openstreetmap?

General talk
1

Is there a way to save USGS 7.5 minute topo quad drgs (tiff format) on Openstreetmaps?
I would think these popular maps would be used on Openstreetmaps.

2

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way to load geotiffs in JOSM or Potlatch, or to easily create a WMS from one.

3

Thanks for the quick reply.

4

Is this any use: WhooMS - the tiny public geotiff wms server http://whooms.mapwarper.net/

5

I tried that but couldn’t get it working. You may have different results.

6

WhooMS worked well for me. (I think it’s really awesome; thanks for the link, Vclaw!)

I think the files need to be in GeoTIFF format with the WGS 84 projection (EPSG 4326) and the data has to be embedded in the TIFF. For the latter, look to see if there’s a companion to your .tif file with a .tfw or .wld extension. If there is, that’s where the geodata is and you’ll have to combine the two files before continuing. With the the GDAL tools (http://www.gdal.org/), you can use gdal_translate (something as simple as ‘gdal_translate -of GTiff -co TILED=YES old.tif new.tif’) to copy the data into a new TIFF file; the new file will have the data embedded. If the files are in a different projection (you can check with gdalinfo), you’ll need to use something like gdalwarp to transform it into WGS 84.

7

On a separate note, rlridgeway, where did you get USGS GeoTIFFs? The best place I’ve found to download them is seamless.usgs.gov, which I find to be a gigantic pain to use.

8

what about merkaartor?

See http://www.merkaartor.org/news/Merkaartor_0.15_released/ … you can import geotiff? or not?

9

I am mainly interested in USGS GeoTiffs of West Virginia. I found these here: http://gis.wvdep.org/data/drg_usfs.html

10

Thanks for your interest and quick reply.

I believe my GeoTiffs are in NAD 83 and have an associated twf file.
Do I transform the projection before I combine the files?

11

http://libremap.org/

12

Changing the projection (at least with gdalwarp) will effectively combine the files, so you only need that one step.

13

Oh, right. I forgot about palette issues. I think all of the USGS DRG files I’ve seen (thanks for the link, NE2) use paletted color, which gdalwarp doesn’t like. You’ll need two steps to deal with that: run gdal_translate with the ‘-expand rgb’ parameters to get a file with color bands, then run gdalwarp (with at least ‘-t_srs EPSG:4326’ parameters) on the banded file to get your final file.

If you want to go back to a color table (66% smaller uncompressed file sizes), use rgb2pct.py. I haven’t been bothering because using compression (the ‘-co COMPRESS=DEFLATE’ option) removes most of that advantage–I see about a 20% space savings for compressed RGB images versus compressed paletted images–and I use all my files locally so I don’t have to worry about bandwidth or other people’s storage capacities.

14

Thanks for the information and your patience but I may be over my head. I am having trouble evening loading gdal_translate.
I went to the site you listed above.
hen gdal Utilities Programs
then gdal_translate
there I am lost.
I thought there would be a program to download but I didn’t see it.
Where am I going wrong?
Thanks again for help.

15

You need to go to the downloads link and download the appropriate package for your system. I use Linux, so I’m probably not going to be much help if you have problems installing onto Window or OS X. Once they’re installed, you’ll have to run the programs from your system’s command line (cmd.exe, Terminal.app, xterm, etc.).

The GDAL Utility Programs link you followed has the documentation for each program, but not the downloads.