Do Planet Basemaps Support Full Bit Depth GeoTIFF Tiles?

Full bit depth GeoTIFF tiles are supported via clients that support tif XYZ tiles (GDAL, QGIS, ArcGIS).

To access full depth tiles, please use the following parameters for your WMTS address: format=geotiff, a .tif extension, and either proc=off for all bands or proc=<index> for pre-calculation of a particular remote sensing index. 

To see the set of supported pre-calculated indices, see Remote Sensing Indices.

For example, to request all bands as a GeoTIFF tile for a single tile (z=8, x=62, y=101) use:

https://tiles.planet.com/basemaps/v1/planet-tiles/ps_biweekly_sen2_normalized_analytic_subscription_2023-10-02_2023-10-16_mosaic/gmap/8/62/101.tif?proc=off&format=geotiff&empty=404&api_key={api-key}

To request the same tile as NDVI values in a floating point GeoTIFF, use:

https://tiles.planet.com/basemaps/v1/planet-tiles/ps_biweekly_sen2_normalized_analytic_subscription_2023-10-02_2023-10-16_mosaic/gmap/8/62/101.tif?proc=ndvi&format=geotiff&empty=404&api_key={api-key}

To use GeoTIFF tiles in GDAL to allow full bit depth streaming into GIS platforms or programmatically access the data, you can configure an XML description of the tile server and use open that as a single dataset in GDAL or add it to QGIS or ArcPro (ArcPro will require renaming the .xml to a .tif extension).

The advantage of using full bit depth streaming in your desktop GIS is that you get the raw values that would be accessed via download, but without needing to download and merge individual quads. This also means you will need to use your GIS software to choose how to display the data (again, identically to what would happen if you downloaded the data). Similarly, you can analyze the overall dataset programmatically without needing to download data.

For additional examples of basemaps using full bit depth, please see the following notebooks:

- Basemaps API 

- Burned Area Delineation 

For more information, visit our Developer center.