Introducing Async-GeoTIFF
We're introducing Async-GeoTIFF, a new high-level library for reading GeoTIFF and Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) data. By leveraging asynchronous I/O, we can speed up concurrent GeoTIFF data fetching.
According to the 2025 GDAL user survey, almost 90% of respondents use GeoTIFFs and COGs as their primary raster data format. While GDAL and its Python bindings Rasterio are fantastic, rock-solid tools, they don't support asynchronous I/O and are missing some modern Python usability features, like type hinting.
We previously found concurrent GeoTIFF metadata parsing at scale to be 25x faster with the underlying Rust-based Async-TIFF library than with Rasterio. We expect Async-GeoTIFF to bring similar performance improvements to concurrent server-side image reading, improving downstream applications such as Titiler.