Creating compressed GeoTIFF with QGIS Clipper tool?

The Clipper tool makes an uncompressed image by default. Read the GDAL manual of your format and add manually the compression options into the gdal_translate command that is shown in the lowest pane.

For example for GeoTIFF read http://gdal.org/frmt_gtiff.html and use for example-co COMPRESS=DEFLATE -co PREDICTOR=2 which gives a well compressed, lossless output for topographic maps.

If you think that it would be trivial to add compression options to the user interface of the Clipper tool it is not because more than 30 formats are supported for the output and all of them have different settings for compression if compression is supported at all.

QGIS uses gdal_translate to clip the raster and the standard output is an uncompressed geo-tiff. Tiff file, however can be compressed using, commonly, one of a couple standard compression algorithms. The first is LZW and the second is JPEG.

To set compression in QGIS's clipper module, click the yellow pencil to enable editting of the commandline at the bottom of the dialog box and add the following creation option

-co COMPRESS=JPEG

You have other options for compression depending on your output format and data. These include: COMPRESS=[JPEG/LZW/PACKBITS/DEFLATE/CCITTRLE/CCITTFAX3/CCITTFAX4/NONE] but I recommend you having a look at the GDAL GeoTiff documentation here.

Another simple alternative to editing the commandline is just to use a JPEG (if appropriate - see documentation).

Deflate and LZW were not working for me. I selected jpeg compression and added: : -co PHOTOMETRIC=YCBCR -co TILED=YES This finally worked! Here is the article that I based this on:

http://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2015/02/geotiff-compression-for-dummies.html