• New GDAL drivers:
  • ESRIC: ESRI bundle cache read-only driver (#2663)
  • HEIF: read-only driver for HEIF/HEIC file. Requires libheif
  • OGCAPI: tiles/maps/coverage raster/vector experimental driver
  • TGA: read/only driver to read TGA image file format
• New OGR drivers:
  • LVBAG: read-only support for Dutch LVBAG/Kadaster 2.0 vector format
• New utilities:
  • gdal_create: to create/initialize a new raster file
• Other improvements:
  • Multi-threaded overview computation (if GDAL_NUM_THREADS set)
  • COG driver: TILING_SCHEME creation option
  • OpenFileGDB driver: add support for using spatial indexes
  • BAG driver: multiple improvements
  • FITS driver: multiple improvements (MEF and binary table support)
  • NITF driver: support for SNIP TREs
  • OGRFieldDefn: support UNIQUE constraint
  • OGRFieldDefn: support a AlternativeName (alias) property (#2729)
  • Python bindings: move implementation of scripts (except gdal2tiles) in osgeo.utils package to be reusable
  • Faster GTIFF Deflate compression/decompression through libdeflate (if using internal libtiff or libtiff > 4.1.0)
• Removed functionality:
  • API_PROXY mechanism: likely never used for real usage.
  • Removal of GDAL and OGR ArcSDE drivers