Satellite Imagery as Georeferenced GeoTIFF
Open BetaSatellite GeoTIFF is a coordinate-aligned satellite snapshot of your area, ready to load into GIS. osm2cdr.ru downloads XYZ tiles from free providers (ESRI World Imagery up to ~1 m/pixel, or Sentinel-2 Cloudless at 10 m/pixel), stitches them, crops to the bounding box and saves a GeoTIFF georeferenced in EPSG:4326 — coordinates and projection are written into the file, so the image drops onto a map in QGIS or ArcGIS without manual alignment. Inside is a 3-channel RGB composite (visible image, JPEG-compressed, tiled), not the 13 spectral bands of Sentinel: it is a visual base, not raw material for NDVI. Coverage is bounded (up to 400 tiles per request).
Key Features
About Satellite GeoTIFF Format
GeoTIFF is an ordinary TIFF with coordinates and a projection written into it as well: a GIS knows which piece of ground each pixel corresponds to and puts the image exactly in its place. The format is open and read by everything — from QGIS and ArcGIS to GDAL, Global Mapper and ENVI.
This export gives you not a drawn map but real imagery from orbit. It is what you need when vector layers are not enough: to show the actual look of a territory, to compare the map with reality, to put a backdrop under your own data, to illustrate a land use report.
How it is assembled: the service downloads tiles from free providers (ESRI World Imagery — about a meter per pixel in cities, Sentinel-2 Cloudless — 10 meters per pixel), stitches them, crops them to your frame and writes a GeoTIFF in the WGS84 coordinate system — a three-band RGB with internal tiling and compression. The zoom is chosen automatically so as to fit into 400 tiles per request: the larger the area, the coarser the pixel.
What the file does not have is spectral bands. This is a visible image for the eye and for a backdrop, not raw material for computing vegetation indices.
What Program Opens Satellite GeoTIFF Files
The following programs and applications can open, edit, and work with Satellite Imagery as Georeferenced GeoTIFF (.tif) files exported from OSM2CDR:
Format specifications
- Open standard
- 2D only
- Lossy compression
- No attributes
- Output: 1 file
- A georeferenced EPSG:4326 GeoTIFF stitched from ESRI World Imagery or Sentinel-2 Cloudless XYZ tiles; a 3-band RGB JPEG-compressed composite, 400-tile cap.
Who Uses Satellite GeoTIFF Maps
How to Export Satellite GeoTIFF
How to Open After Export
- QGIS — Layer > Add Raster Layer; the image will take its place by itself, nothing has to be georeferenced by hand.
- ArcGIS Pro — Add Data and pick the file; from there it is convenient to put it as a backdrop under your vector layers.
- GDAL — gdalinfo shows the projection, the size and the resolution, and gdalwarp converts the image into a metric projection if your project is run in one.
- A hybrid map — download the same area as SVG, GeoJSON or DXF and put it over the imagery: you get satellite with vector labels.
- Attribution — the imagery belongs to the providers (ESRI and its suppliers, or Sentinel-2 Cloudless by EOX under the CC BY 4.0 license); credit the source when you publish.
Popular maps in Satellite GeoTIFF
Get Satellite Imagery as Georeferenced GeoTIFF map exports
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