What raster and vector data formats does GDAL support?

GDAL supports a large and continuously growing list of raster and vector formats through a driver-based architecture. If your data is in a common geospatial format — GeoTIFF, COG, ENVI, ECW, Shapefile, GeoJSON, and hundreds more — GDAL almost certainly has a driver for it. The authoritative way to confirm support for any specific format is to check the official driver lists in the GDAL documentation, since coverage changes with each release.

How the driver model works

GDAL is a translator library for raster and vector geospatial data formats, released under an MIT-style open source license by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. Rather than hard-coding format handling, it presents a single raster abstract data model and a single vector abstract data model to the calling application for all supported formats.

Each format is handled by a driver. A driver knows how to read (and often write) one family of files. When you open a dataset, GDAL identifies the matching driver and exposes the data through the same abstract model regardless of the underlying format. This is why the same command-line utility or API call can process a GeoTIFF, an ENVI file, or a JPEG with no code changes.

Two consequences follow from this design:

• Support is per-driver, not per-format-family. A format may be readable but not writable, or support may depend on how GDAL was built.
• The driver list is the source of truth. Because drivers are added, updated, and occasionally retired between releases, the documentation for your version is what determines what you can actually open.

Raster formats

The documentation maintains a dedicated Raster drivers section listing every supported raster format. Examples drawn from that list include:

The list also covers specialized scientific and remote-sensing formats such as CEOS, COSAR (TerraSAR-X), CPHD (Compensated Phase History Data), ERS, and many others. Some entries are generators rather than pure readers — COG, for instance, is described as a "Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF generator."

Vector formats

Vector data is handled the same way, with its own Vector drivers section. The documentation's index lists raster and vector drivers as separate top-level categories, so you can browse the vector list independently to check whether a given vector format is supported.

How to verify a specific format

1. Open the GDAL documentation for your installed version.
2. Go to the Raster drivers or Vector drivers section.
3. Search the list for your format name or file extension.
4. Read the individual driver page to confirm whether it supports reading, writing, or both, and whether it has build-time dependencies.

This matters because a driver's presence in the list does not guarantee it is active in your particular build. Some drivers depend on external libraries and may be compiled out.

Practical notes

• Check your version. The documentation notes the August 2026 GDAL/OGR 3.13.3 release, and driver coverage evolves between releases. A format supported in the current docs may not exist in an older installation.
• Offline reference. The documentation is also available as a PDF for offline browsing, which is useful when you need to check driver support on a machine without internet access.
• Command-line utilities. GDAL ships with a variety of command-line utilities for data translation and processing, so once you confirm a driver exists, you can typically convert or inspect the data without writing code.

If a format is not in the driver lists, GDAL cannot read it natively — you would need to convert it with another tool first, or check whether a newer release has added the driver.