Earth observation

See the pricing page for detailed information.

In short, aerial data is captured from airplanes, while satellite data is, as the name implies, captured by satellites in orbit around the Earth. A good rule of thumb is that aerial data is of very high resolution, as the planes fly closer to the ground, and satellite data is lower resolution but updated much more often, as they are orbiting the Earth and continuously capturing new data.

For more information, see our blog post on the subject.

When you navigate our maps, you'll notice small squares loading - these are 'tiles'. With our base package, you receive 1 million of these tiles per month. This covers most use cases, unless you have a service which is used by many external users. Additional tiles on top of the base package are invoiced per 1,000 tiles. Please see the pricing page for more information.

To be sure there are no unpleasant surprises for you, we have set a default monthly limit, such that you cannot query more tiles than included in the base package, without requesting it. You are welcome to contact us at [email protected] to increase your limit.

Yes, you can download and store the data locally. In fact, it is very easy to do so. We recommend the Contextily Python package, which supports downloading images from our APIs and storing them in standard image formats, such as JPEG or PNG, or as geo-referenced images in GeoTIFF format. Send us a mail at [email protected] if you would like a Python script to get started.

Absolutely. It is a high priority for us to include more countries, and we are currently looking into adding a range of new ones.