diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index e855a1a83..3f5c726a1 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -5,6 +5,9 @@
 ### Improvements
 - Log and recover from occasional openslide failures ([#1461](../../pull/1461))
 
+### Changes
+- Make GDAL an optional dependency for the converter ([#1464](../../pull/1464))
+
 ### Bug Fixes
 - Fix an issue with uniform band depth on multi source with non uniform sources ([#1459](../../pull/1459))
 
diff --git a/README.rst b/README.rst
index 80a7ea3ff..fce9d9d55 100644
--- a/README.rst
+++ b/README.rst
@@ -110,7 +110,7 @@ Large Image consists of several Python modules designed to work together.  These
   - ``all``: for all of the above
 
 - ``large-image-converter``: A utility for using pyvips and other libraries to convert images into pyramidal tiff files that can be read efficiently by large_image.
-  You can specify extras_require of ``jp2k`` to include modules to allow output to JPEG2000 compression, ``sources`` to include all sources, and ``stats`` to include modules to allow computing compression noise statistics.
+  You can specify extras_require of ``jp2k`` to include modules to allow output to JPEG2000 compression, ``sources`` to include all sources, ``stats`` to include modules to allow computing compression noise statistics, ``geospatial`` to include support for converting geospatial sources, or ``all`` for all of the optional extras_require.
 
 - Tile sources:
 
diff --git a/utilities/converter/setup.py b/utilities/converter/setup.py
index bd94de466..e3a8cba4a 100644
--- a/utilities/converter/setup.py
+++ b/utilities/converter/setup.py
@@ -56,7 +56,6 @@ def prerelease_local_scheme(version):
         'Programming Language :: Python :: 3.12',
     ],
     install_requires=[
-        'gdal',
         f'large-image-source-tiff{limit_version}',
         'numpy',
         'psutil',
@@ -67,6 +66,9 @@ def prerelease_local_scheme(version):
         'jp2k': [
             'glymur',
         ],
+        'geospatial': [
+            'gdal',
+        ],
         'sources': [
             f'large-image[sources]{limit_version}',
         ],
@@ -74,6 +76,13 @@ def prerelease_local_scheme(version):
             'packaging',
             'scikit-image',
         ],
+        'all': [
+            'glymur',
+            'gdal',
+            f'large-image[sources]{limit_version}',
+            'packaging',
+            'scikit-image',
+        ],
     },
     packages=find_packages(),
     entry_points={