I have started a 14 day trial of Planet.com who provide daily satellite imagery. I have downloaded a scene and have loaded it into QGIS successfully. The colours are weird but this maybe deliberate as the images are for analysis not for use as a base image. If I load the same image into Manifold, it georeferences correctly but displays as a rectangle with millions of coloured points. I cannot load the file into WhiteBox either. WhiteBox complains that the tiff has been compressed. The images do not open in standard image viewers either, although one showed the internal header which had a lot of metadata in json.

There are no directions on the Planet.com site for using the images. Has anyone used imagery from this source?

I haven't, but do you have links to their documentation on the images? Can you post a sample image? Are you using 9 or 8? If you don't have 9, have you tried Viewer to look at the image?

Sorry, Dimitri

I am using M9 current build and I have read their documentation. The images are 350 MB in a zip file so it might be easier to just log in and get a sample for yourself. Given that these guys will revolutionise satellite imagery that would be worth doing. The one trick was that their analytical images have four bands and the first three are blue, green, red and not red, green, blue so I had to swap the bands in QGIS to see the image in normal colour.

From their response email, I go the reference to their docs.

https://assets.planet.com/docs/Planet_Combined_Imagery_Product_Specs_letter_screen.pdf

https://developers.planet.com/

https://support.planet.com/hc/en-us/articles/211459138--Using-Planet-GeoTIFFs-in-QGIS

The images are 350 MB in a zip file so it might be easier to just log in and get a sample for yourself.

I didn't see any links in your post to a sample image. If you think this is an error in 9, send in a bug report.

It's always best for Support to work with the specific file with which you report a problem. That avoids situations such as some files on a web site being defective and others being OK. Also, if an account is required to fetch an image, that's not something tech support will do (such sites have terms and conditions to accounts that require legal review).

If I load the same image into Manifold, it georeferences correctly but displays as a rectangle with millions of coloured points.

What did you do in the Style panel to work with that? It could be something as simple as needing to command use of full range for channel values. See the HDF topic for an example of how to do that.

This tech part is way over my head, but is this API reference page helpful?

https://developers.planet.com/docs/api/reference/#

Apparently the Planet imagery is readable by ESRI, so that wouldn't make it a potential imagery source for M9?

If somebody has a problem importing a file, the next step is to get that file and try importing it. Without the actual file it's just guesswork, which is a lousy way to proceed when a few moments with the actual file will likely clear up all mysteries.

The file is too big to post here. I downloaded the high resolution imagery file for Cities from Planet at this download site. Apparently it is imagery from the Boston area. I imported the folder with tif and json files into M9. I opened a Drawing, Table and a _L3A_pansharp for one table. Image is attached. If you zoom in on the _L3A_pansharp image you can see ghosts of the image at different zoom levels. The drawing is a gray rectangle. The table shows there is one record and it is not indexed.

Attachments:
Planet Download in M9.jpg

Can't import a file? OK. That's a routine issue in a system that handles hundreds of formats and sub-formats. It's either a) a bug in the data provided, b) a bug in the dataport, or c) user error.

The fastest possible way to solve the problem is this algorithm:

1) Do you feel comfortable importing into 9? If so, immediately file a Bug Report. That leads to a very rapid correction of anything required by a) or b) above. If it is c), no harm done. We've all been there.

2) Uncertain about your 9 skills? That's OK. We've all been there, too. It's smart and responsible to touch base quickly with friends in this forum to eliminate obvious instances of c), if you provide info people need to analyze the situation. If responders tell you to file a bug report, do that.

Example:

"I'm using 9, 168.2. This file imports weird: <insert direct link here to dropbox, etc., from which the file can be downloaded.> Documentation on the site claims it is a geotiff. I imported using defaults. Tips? "

Following the above algorithm would have solved the problem by now, probably the first day. Any tweaks required for a) and b) could have been put into the build that will come out today or tomorrow. Routine, quick, easy.

So... I urge everyone to keep it simple in such routine matters. Provide a sample file and help a solution happen quickly. There are many free services out there which enable you to provide public links to larger files for download.

[Edited to remove any tone of frustration...]

At this stage, I do not use Planet.com imagery. I am just trying it out for future use. I am just reporting the failure of Manifold to import the imagery for the benefit of Manifold. I think it unreasonable to expect me to jump through a lot of hoops to report a bug. Given that Planent.com will revolutionise use of satellite imagery, that should be a better reason to get on top of this as soon as possible. The sample images are licensed under Creative Commons, so I can't see any issue with obtaining them although it was not these images that I was trialing, it was the 4-band analytical images.

I think it unreasonable to expect me to jump through a lot of hoops to report a bug.

No hoops. It is a one-sentence email sent to tech support:

"Here's an image <link> that seems not to import correctly into 9, 168.2. It's said to be a geotiff. Thanks!"

If you don't have a place where you can put an image, the bug report reads like this:

"I have what is said to be a geotiff that doesn't import correctly into 9, 168.2. Can I send it to you?"

Tech replies with instructions how to FTP. Also easy, no hoops.

[Edited to keep it simple.]

Manifold 9.0.168.0 cannot read tiff files from Planet.com

Sure it can. :-) Planet.com seem to be GDAL users so use the GDAL dataport in 9:

Attachments:
boston_planet_pansharp.jpg

Installed GDAL according to directions here and tried to import both the Planet.com images and the example file referenced here in the Manifold manual. Neither one imported anything. I will troubleshoot this later if my day slows down, but things are backing up right now.

I used the release 1911 GDAL file from this site at GIS Internals. Apparently there is a requirement for Python, which I need to look into. This is fiddly to set up, but the possibility of getting more frequent aerials might make it worth it.

How did you import them (step by step)? Remember, you first have to choose .Files (GDAL/OGR) (*.*) in the type box, and only then can you double-click the .tif file to import it.

It's strange the geotiff from planet.com doesn't come right in. I think every other geotiff I've tried has imported immediately. Today I imported a bunch of 16 bit geotiffs from the GEBCO bathymetry data set and they imported with no problem.

The import was straight forward.

1. Open Manifold 9
2. File>Import...
3. Change type box from All Files to .Files (GDAL/OGR)(*.*)
4. Browse to the pansharpened folder inside the skysat-high-resolution sample-cities folder
5. Select any or all of the .tif files using Shift click or Ctrl click
6. Click Import

Since I also could not import the .gis file from the GDAL example page in the manual, I am thinking the GDAL installation is not right or not complete.

It is worth checking the log window to see if it complains about anything (unable to load GDAL DLLs because they are not in path?).

That helps, thanks. The log says it failed to load three GDAL dll files. I inventoried my computer and those three files are not in the inventory, so I need to address that.

The log is something I'm going to have to keep on my mind. No longer should I say, "I tried this and nothing happened."

If you're going to fix this some day, I might just wait it out - sort of like I'm waiting for the PDF printing and the rest of the development, because I trust it will get much much better when you folks get to it. I understand priorities.

sort of like I'm waiting for the PDF printing

More progress ahead, for sure, but I'm puzzled by the above. What's the issue in the above? PDF printing works great in 9. Have you seen the PDFs I posted in another thread?

and the rest of the development

Never hurts to speak up. If there is something you want prioritized, send in a suggestion. People who send in suggestions set priorities.

Was so curious I couldn't resist looking it up... for PDF did you mean this: http://www.georeference.org/forum/t144896#145004 ? If so, I think that's in the pipeline for a build soon. It's a driver issue, but easy for Manifold to work around.

Yes, that's the reference. Except for that issue, the M9 PDFs are excellent. I figured since things got quiet on that topic, that a fix was in the works.

Besides that, will M9 print/export layered PDFs? I made a lot of money with those back in 08. In the current job I get people requesting the same map with different layers after I print, so I've taken to exporting all the layers from M8 so I don't have to go back and recreate the layout they originally had.

We do plan to write layered PDF files, but not right away. The culprit is driver support.

For what it is worth, we also downloaded a couple of files and indeed they don't work right out of the bat. You can still import them into 9 through GDAL, like Dimitri shows - and that's a useful things to be able to do - but we will also make amends to our own dataport to support them without any tricks.

Thanks for the pointer.