Satellite Imagery as JPEG
Open BetaSatellite JPEG is a satellite snapshot of your area in compressed JPEG — the very 'Satellite' mode you see in web maps. 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 as JPEG at quality 92. Compared with PNG the file is several times lighter at the cost of slight loss on flat areas — an optimal trade-off between weight and readability. It is a plain image with no georeferencing; if you need coordinates choose satellite GeoTIFF. Coverage is bounded (up to 400 tiles per request).
Key Features
About Satellite JPEG Format
JPEG is the most widespread raster image format: it compresses with losses, but the file comes out several times lighter. For satellite imagery that is a good compromise — the eye hardly notices the losses, and the page loads fast.
The export gives you the satellite view of your area as an ordinary picture: to put into a presentation, a report, an article, or as a background on a website. There is no vector map in the file — this is the view of the ground from orbit.
How it is assembled: tiles from free providers (ESRI World Imagery, about a meter per pixel in cities, and Sentinel-2 Cloudless with 10 meters per pixel) are downloaded, stitched, cropped to your frame and saved as a high-quality JPEG; the zoom is chosen automatically to fit the limit of 400 tiles. There are no coordinates in the file: if the image has to land in its own place in a GIS, take the GeoTIFF option.
What Program Opens Satellite JPEG Files
The following programs and applications can open, edit, and work with Satellite Imagery as JPEG (.jpg) files exported from OSM2CDR:
Format specifications
- Open standard
- 2D only
- Lossy compression
- No attributes
- Output: 1 file
- A plain JPEG (quality 92) stitched from ESRI/Sentinel-2 XYZ tiles and cropped to the bbox; no georeferencing — for coordinates use the satellite GeoTIFF. 400-tile cap.
Who Uses Satellite JPEG Maps
How to Export Satellite JPEG
How to Open After Export
- Any viewer or browser — JPEG opens everywhere, nothing to install.
- Photoshop, GIMP, Affinity Photo — crop, caption, adjust brightness and contrast before publishing.
- PowerPoint, Word, page layout — insert it as an ordinary picture; for printing, check in advance that there are enough pixels for the physical size you need.
- Web — for a page the image is usually worth shrinking and recompressing: a full-size frame is excessive for a screen.
- Attribution — when publishing, credit the source of the imagery: ESRI and its suppliers, or Sentinel-2 Cloudless by EOX (CC BY 4.0).
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