Item Previews

last updated: December 06, 2023

Thumbnails

The Data API provides previews of Planet imagery data as thumbnails. A thumbnail is a down-sampled PNG version of an item's visual asset that can be used as a preview of the image without needing to download a full GeoTIFF. The thumbnail URL is advertised by the key thumbnail in the _links dictionary of an item's metadata. To see an example, inspect the response of https://api.planet.com/data/v1/item-types/PSScene/items/20160223_174714_0c72.

"_links": {
  "_self": "https://api.planet.com/data/v1/item-types/PSScene/items/20160223_174714_0c72",
  "assets": "https://api.planet.com/data/v1/item-types/PSScene/items/20160223_174714_0c72/assets/"
  "thumbnail": "https://tiles.planet.com/data/v1/item-types/PSScene/items/20160223_174714_0c72/thumb"
}

Size

The thumbnail by default is 256×256 pixels, and can be scaled up to 512×512 by passing in the width parameter and setting it to values up to 512. If you have download access to the visual asset, you can scale the thumbnail higher by setting the width parameter to a maximum of 2048.

Authentication

Authentication for thumbnails can be done with basic HTTP or by providing an api_key parameter to the URL.


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