There could be various reasons why you are having difficulty opening Landsat images in ENVI 5.1 using the "File>open as>Landsat> Geotiff with Metadata" option, and the error message you are receiving is not very specific. Here are a few possible solutions that may help:

Hi try to open it by replacing the first line in the GROUP = LANDSAT_METADATA_FILE in MTL.txt file by replacing

GROUP = L1_METADATA_FILE

Madan Kumar Khadka thanks a lot. But when I made that change I got a new error message suggesting that "File does not appear to be a valid TIFF file". This happened for B1, 8, 9 and 10. The final error read "Object reference type required in this context: ORASTERQUALITY.

Thanks a lot for your help

Hi Glory Enaruvbe, one of my friend has same issues but I solved by editing MTL files but I have no idea about this new issues.

Ok @Madan Kumar Khadka. Thanks a lot. I believe the issue with this may be because of the version. Your friend is using 5.3 and I am on 5.1. That may be the issue.

Again, I thank you so much!

Supporting file missing please again Download file Extract and open in ENVI SOFTWARE

Mohan Vasave your response is a bit confusing. What "Supporting file" do you say is missing and needs to be downloaded and from where please?

Thank you for your response.

Hi Glory Enarubve,

I am having the exact same issue. Like you, I used the solution above - alter the mtl file to fix the "Unable to read file as the specified filetype: LANDSAT_GEOTIFF_META" error. That got me a little further.

I am also getting your second error ""File does not appear to be a valid TIFF file" and "Object reference type required in this context: ORASTERQUALITY." I am a student and we are using ENVI 5.1 - the same version you were using. I was wondering if you were ever able to find a solution for this second error?

Thank you,

Courtney

@Courtney, unfortunately I could not find a solution to the issue.

Thank you for getting back to me. If I figure it out, I will post the answer here.

Glory Enaruvbe. I might have the answer. Turns out that every student in my class had the same issue opening Landsat images and getting the same error message. Didn't matter if they were Landsat 7 or 8, Level 1 or 2 images. The professor thinks that USGS might have updated their imagery and it no longer works with the version of ENVI that we are working with (5.1). She thinks that upgrading the version of ENVI might solve the issue. Sorry that I don't have anything more definitive.

Clearly that must be the issue. Thanks a lot for the feedback

I do not think the version of Envi is the issue. I am using Envi 5.6 but still facing the same challenge. Please share, if you have found a solution other than the version.

Thank you.

Good to know. Looks like upgrading might not be the answer. I will let my professor know.

@Kingsley, Thanks for the information. This is useful.

Did you find any solution for it?

None, please. What I have done is save each ban as a tif file in QGIS and then stack. This solution has its own issues though. I am now finding it difficult to preprocess (radiometric correction for instance). I tried many recommendations I found online but none worked.

hey I have the answer to this issue: Just select all the bands and drag them into your Envi Canvas. The metadata file will automatically be available in the data manager window.

@Ansar Ali, I will try this out. Thank you for sharing

To solve this problem, kindly open the MTL. txt file with Notepad in you PC, at the first row, replace the "Landsat" with "L1_" save the file and try importing it again, it will work this time.

NB: don't forget to put underscore "_"after typing "L1"

Enjoy your multispectral image afterwards.

I hope this solves your problem.