[GIS] ECW not reocgnized as supported file format in GDAL operation

ecwerdas-imaginegdalqgisraster

I've installed QGIS 3.6 for MAC, with GDAL 2.4, ECW GDAL Plugin for GDAL 2.4, and manually installed the libraries from ERDAS ECWJP2SDK 5.4.

This allows me to insert ECW files as raster layers in QGIS. I'd like to export them all as GeoTIF, so I was thinking of using GDAL Translate (convert format) in batch mode.

However, GDAL doesnt seem to recognize ECW: in QGIS messages panel I get "xyz.ecw not recognized as a supported file format.".

In QGIS preferences / GDAL I am seeing ECW with "rw+" flag and "ERDAS Compressed Wavelets (SDK 5.4)" so I think it was installed correctly (and ECW files do display, they just are not understood by GDAL).

All help deeply aprecciated.

Using macOS 10.14.3.

Best Answer

I got it to work. I think the instructions on the QGIS 2.6 for macOS installer's read me are not 100% correct. There we can read:

For the Value enter: /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.6/bin:/Library/Frameworks/GDAL.framework/Versions/2.3/Programs:

but it turned out I had to enter 2 PATH variables and not only one. Plus, the GDAL version should be 2.4 instead of 2.3!

PATH configuration

Do it like in the image above and GDAL will recognize ECW files.