When working with raster datasets I often encounter limitations caused by the large size of the files. I thus wrote up a little R function that invokes gdal_translate which would split the raster into parts.
The screenshot to the left shows a raster in QGIS that was split into four parts with the below script.
## get filesnames (assuming the datasets were downloaded already.
## please see http://thebiobucket.blogspot.co.at/2013/06/use-r-to-bulk-download-digital.html
## on how to download high-resolution DEMs)
setwd("D:/GIS_DataBase/DEM")
files <- dir(pattern = ".hgt")
## function for single file processing mind to replace the PATH to gdalinfo.exe!
## s = division applied to each side of raster, i.e. s = 2 gives 4 tiles, 3 gives 9, etc.
split_raster <- function(file, s = 2) {
filename <- gsub(".hgt", "", file)
gdalinfo_str <- paste0("\"C:/OSGeo4W64/bin/gdalinfo.exe\" ", file)
# pick size of each side
x <- as.numeric(gsub("[^0-9]", "", unlist(strsplit(system(gdalinfo_str, intern = T)[3], ", "))))[1]
y <- as.numeric(gsub("[^0-9]", "", unlist(strsplit(system(gdalinfo_str, intern = T)[3], ", "))))[2]
# t is nr. of iterations per side
t <- s - 1
for (i in 0:t) {
for (j in 0:t) {
# [-srcwin xoff yoff xsize ysize] src_dataset dst_dataset
srcwin_str <- paste("-srcwin ", i * x/s, j * y/s, x/s, y/s)
gdal_str <- paste0("\"C:/OSGeo4W64/bin/gdal_translate.exe\" ", srcwin_str, " ", "\"", file, "\" ", "\"", filename, "_", i, "_", j, ".tif\"")
system(gdal_str)
}
}
}
## process all files and save to same directory
mapply(split_raster, files, 2)
