GDALCOMPARE(1)

📦
version 3.4.3 · 2 versions
, in epel 9

💅 GDALCOMPARE 💅

okay so bestie, buckle up — this is gdalcompare, a.k.a. the GDAL man page from the GDAL manual fam, and honestly? she's a vibe. she compares two images and tells you every single thing that's different about them. lowkey iconic.

✨ NAME ✨

gdalcompare — compare two images. that's it. that's the whole job. 🎀

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

gdalcompare.py [-sds] golden_file new_file

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so the gdalcompare.py script takes two datasets that GDAL can handle and reports the differences between them. and not just, like, quietly — she reports differences to standard output and she returns the difference count in her exit value. double whammy. 💖

what actually gets checked? image pixels, for one. and various metadata too. and on top of all that there's a byte-by-byte comparison happening, which counts as one difference. so like — heads up — if the only thing you actually care about is that the GDAL-visible data is identical, then a difference count of 1 (that's the binary difference right there) should be considered acceptable. no cap. ✨

  • -sds — if you pass this flag, the script will compare all the subdatasets that are part of the dataset. if you don't pass it, subdatasets are just ignored. simple as that. 🙈
  • <golden_file> — the file that's considered correct, a.k.a. the golden file. she's the reference, she's the moment, she's the standard. 👑
  • <new_file> — the file being compared against the golden file, a.k.a. the new file. she's the one under the microscope 🔥
ngl one thing you should know: the gdalcompare.py script (like literally all the other scripts, fr fr) can also be called as a library straight from your python code:
from osgeo_utils import gdalcompare

the primary entry point is gdalcompare.compare(), which takes a golden gdal.Dataset and a new gdal.Dataset as arguments and returns a difference count — and yes, that's excluding the binary comparison, just so we're clear 💅. and if you're doing the subdataset thing, the gdalcompare.compare_sds() entry point is right there for comparing subdatasets. 🫶

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Frank Warmerdam <warmerdam@pobox.com> — the author herself. respect the icon. 🌈

1998-2026 — yeah, she's been serving for a minute. ⭐

and that's the tea, bestie 🍓 — this page is from the GDAL manual, dated Jan 08, 2026, and it lives at GDALCOMPARE(1). go forth and diff. 🧚💅

📦 where this page comes from