How to import a Mapinfo Interchange Format .MIF to a shapefile

I downloaded some species distributions from AgroAtlas earlier which were in MapInfo MIF/MID format.  It had been years since I had to import this format to .shp to view in ESRI ArcGIS and it took a little digging to figure out how.  So I thought I would blog it so I would have it documented for next time.

First of all I checked ArcGIS for a quick win, and was disapointed.  Apparently there are two options.

1. The first is to use the MIF to shapefile utility found in the ArcGIS8.x toolbar as documented here.  However this didn't work for me.  I got an error stating "Unable to finish conversion" and the tool only created a .shp and a .shx, with no .dbf or .prj for that matter.
2. The second ESRI method was to buy the ArcGIS Data Interoperability Extension which seemed a little xtreme just to check out a couple of small datasets.

So I got onto google and found a third non-ESRI solution using the GDAL/OGR Simple Feature Library in FWTools.  FWTools is a set of Open Source GIS binaries for windows or linux including the GDAL/OGR command line libraries.  FWTools is the easiest way to install the GDAL libraries onto windows and can be done via an installer .exe file downloadable here. Simply double click the exe file and follow the on screen installation instructions.  Once installed open up the FWTools Shell from either the start menu>programs or the desktop short cut then enter the following command:


ogr2ogr -f "ESRI Shapefile" c:\output-path-to-shapefile\mydata.shp c:\path-to-mif-mid-files\mydata.mif

That was the simple how-to example,ogr2ogr has many other parameters that can be specified click here for full ogr2ogr usage documentation.

Ogr supports multiple data formats including: ESRI Shapefile, MapInfo Tab file, TIGER, s57, DGN, CSV, DBF, GML, KML, Interlis, SQLite, ODBC, ESRI GeoDatabase (MDB format), PostGIS/PostgreSQL, MySQL.

Other references used in researching this article:

http://osgeo-org.1803224.n2.nabble.com/Fwd-FWrools-OGR-utilities-mif-to-shape-conversion-ogr2ogr-not-recognizing-mif-file-td5313127.html


http://www.bostongis.com/PrinterFriendly.aspx?content_name=ogr_cheatsheet