Spaced-OoooO-Out ::

I had a stack of old IDRISI IMG files that I wanted to look back at a short while ago. I fired up ERDAS Imagine and found that it didn’t have a convertor for IDRISI. After a lot of searching on the internet I still didn’t have much of an answer other than you needed IDRISI to convert files in to Imagine format. I did a load more searching and finally came back with a newsgroup post about IMG format files. If yuo look at the directory listing you will see that there is actually an IMG file (the image data) and a DOC file (header information). The former is binary and the latter text. It turns out that IMG files are actually just RAW (as in SunOS, not digital cameras) files. So my solution was to change the file extension to RAW, load Paint Shop Pro (or Photoshop) and open the file. You need to get the image size (rows and columns) from the header DOC and enter these in the import dialogue. Hey presto the image appears! I then saved this as a TIFF and imported it in to Imagine. I could then add the image properties (coordinates, projection etc) and had a fully working image.

Hopefully this might make it easier for anyone else in the same situation!