geospatial-viewers

Geospatial Viewers

Three CLI tools for quick-look inspection of geospatial data. Always run them via uvx so they are auto-installed without polluting the project environment.

Tool	Purpose	PyPI
viewtif	Interactive Qt viewer for rasters (GeoTIFF, HDF, NetCDF, FileGDB)	uvx viewtif
viewgeom	Interactive Qt viewer for vector datasets	uvx viewgeom
viewinline	Non-interactive terminal-inline viewer (rasters, vectors, CSV, Parquet)	uvx viewinline

Choosing the Right Tool

• Need interactive zoom/pan/contrast? Use viewtif (rasters) or viewgeom (vectors).
• Quick inline preview in iTerm2/WezTerm/Konsole? Use viewinline (no GUI window, renders in terminal).
• CSV/Parquet analysis (stats, histograms, SQL)? Use viewinline.
• Vector file as table (describe, filter, sort)? Use viewinline --table.
• Headless server / SSH / HPC? Use viewinline (renders on local terminal, no X11 needed).

Running with uvx

Always prepend uvx to auto-install and run without modifying the local environment:

uvx viewtif file.tif
uvx viewgeom boundaries.geojson
uvx viewinline file.tif

For optional extras, use the --from flag:

uvx --from "viewtif[geo]" viewtif raster.tif --shapefile overlay.shp
uvx --from "viewtif[netcdf]" viewtif data.nc
uvx --from "viewgeom[parquet]" viewgeom data.geoparquet

Quick Reference

# Raster inspection
uvx viewtif image.tif
uvx viewtif image.tif --shapefile boundaries.shp
uvx viewtif image.tif --rgb 4 3 2
uvx viewtif image.tif --vmin 280 --vmax 320
uvx viewtif huge_raster.tif --scale 10

# NetCDF / HDF
uvx --from "viewtif[netcdf]" viewtif data.nc --subset 1 --timestep 100

# FileGDB raster
uvx viewtif "OpenFileGDB:/path/to.gdb:RasterName"

# Remote files
AWS_NO_SIGN_REQUEST=YES uvx --from "viewtif[geo]" viewtif s3://bucket/raster.tif --shapefile local.shp

# Vector inspection
uvx viewgeom boundaries.geojson
uvx viewgeom landuse.shp --column area_sqkm
uvx viewgeom earthquake.geojson --filter "mag > 5"
uvx viewgeom earthquake.geojson --duckdb "SELECT * FROM data WHERE mag > 5"
uvx viewgeom earthquake.geojson --duckdb "SELECT mag FROM data WHERE mag > 5" --save filtered.geojson

# Terminal-inline preview
uvx viewinline file.tif --colormap
uvx viewinline sentinel2.tif --rgb 4 3 2
uvx viewinline boundaries.geojson --color-by population
uvx viewinline file.nc --subset 1 --timestep 10

# CSV / Parquet analysis
uvx viewinline data.csv --describe
uvx viewinline data.csv --hist area_km2 --bins 30
uvx viewinline data.csv --scatter longitude latitude
uvx viewinline data.csv --sql "SELECT State, AVG(Income) FROM data GROUP BY State"

# Vector as table
uvx viewinline counties.shp --table --describe
uvx viewinline data.geoparquet --table --where "POP > 100000" --sort POP --desc

# Image gallery
uvx viewinline outputs/ --gallery 4x3

References

• references/viewtif.md
• references/viewgeom.md
• references/viewinline.md