GDAL seems to interpret first three tiff bands by default as red, green, blue

[mlennert]

I have the multispectral bands of a Worldview 2 scene in one .tiff file. gdalinfo gives me:

Band 1 Block=8200x63 Type=UInt16, ColorInterp=Red
Band 2 Block=8200x63 Type=UInt16, ColorInterp=Green
Band 3 Block=8200x63 Type=UInt16, ColorInterp=Blue
Band 4 Block=8200x63 Type=UInt16, ColorInterp=Undefined
Band 5 Block=8200x63 Type=UInt16, ColorInterp=Undefined
Band 6 Block=8200x63 Type=UInt16, ColorInterp=Undefined
Band 7 Block=8200x63 Type=UInt16, ColorInterp=Undefined
Band 8 Block=8200x63 Type=UInt16, ColorInterp=Undefined

which is not correct as in this image

1:Coastal
2:Blue
3:Green
4:Yellow
5:Red
6:Red Edge
7:NIR1
8:NIR2

On what basis does GDAL decide the ColorInterp ?

This has the annoying side effect that when using r.in.gdal in GRASS, I get wrong layer names as these are based on ColorInterp.

[Even Rouault]

GDAL decides the color intrepretation from the value of the TIFFTAG_PHOTOMETRIC. From the above output, the file must have TIFFTAG_PHOTOMETRIC (wrongly) set to PHOTOMETRIC_RGB. So the problem is more on the producer of the file. Anyway don't expect a perfect solution for band color interpretation in GeoTIFF. There's no way in the specification to indicate in a file a color interpretation as the one you would expect.

[mlennert]

Replying to rouault:

GDAL decides the color intrepretation from the value of the TIFFTAG_PHOTOMETRIC. From the above output, the file must have TIFFTAG_PHOTOMETRIC (wrongly) set to PHOTOMETRIC_RGB. So the problem is more on the producer of the file. Anyway don't expect a perfect solution for band color interpretation in GeoTIFF. There's no way in the specification to indicate in a file a color interpretation as the one you would expect.

That's it. tiffinfo gives me:

Photometric Interpretation: RGB color

Ok. Closing this as invalid. Sorry for the noise.