What's wrong is that readGDAL tries to allocate all the memory required and build an object to essentially replace the file, and your machine cannot provide sufficient resources for that. GDAL.open provides an open connnection to the file that can be queried in different ways to read parts of the file as necessary.
You can provide low level arguments to readGDAL to subset/subsample: "offset", "region.dim", and "output.dim". See ?readGDAL. But, there are facilities in the raster package to open the file with GDAL.open and read on demand. Try this: library(raster) raster("a.tif") If your .tif has more than one band, you'll have to use raster::brick() or raster::stack(), which will read only the first band by default. Cheers, Mike. On Mon, Oct 20, 2014 at 1:29 PM, PO SU <rhelpmaill...@163.com> wrote: > > Dear expeRts, > I want to read a a.tif file into R. > When i try this: > readGDAL("a.tif"), i get the following error: > > > a.tif has GDAL driver GTiff > and has 7200 rows and 7200 columns > > error: can't allocate 395.5 mb vector > but i can GDAL.open("a.tif") it. > SO what's wrong with readGDAL? > > > > > > -- > > PO SU > mail: desolato...@163.com > Majored in Statistics from SJTU > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. -- Michael Sumner Software and Database Engineer Australian Antarctic Division Hobart, Australia e-mail: mdsum...@gmail.com ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.