Adding Your Own Imagery

Lens is meant to be a place where you can review all the imagery you need in one place. If you have imagery that’s been captured for your organization or public aerial imagery, let us know what would be most helpful for your monitoring and we’ll work to bring it to you in Lens. Read more about the technical specifications for how we can currently ingest imagery below:

Public aerial data WMTS

For customers with Lens Standard and Lens Enterprise plans

Many states provide public orthoimagery, which is high resolution aerial images that are highly spatially accurate, and collect this aerial data on a planned schedule. Timing and availability may vary by state. For customers with Lens Standard and Enterprise plans, we are able to ingest and display true color imagery in your Lens account if it is in a web map tile service (WMTS) format. A WMTS is a standard protocol for streaming georeferenced map tiles over the Internet. Check your state’s GIS website and look for words like “tile service,” such as the example from Massachusetts’ MassGIS 2021 Aerial Imagery below:

If your state has a WMTS available for orthoimagery, reach out to us at lens@upstream.tech to submit a request to add this data to your Lens account. This imagery will then be listed in the date dropdown along with the public imagery and any commercial imagery you’ve ordered through Lens, and can provide a crisp truecolor image you can use for monitoring or as a baseline against which to compare recent changes.

Example from Lens showing orthoimagery captured near Medford, Massachusetts. We have ingested state orthoimagery data by request from Massachusetts, Maryland, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. If you have properties in these states, you will see the data in your date dropdown if the property is covered by the aerial survey.

Custom imagery captures

For customers with a Lens Enterprise plan 

If your organization has captured its own additional drone, aerial, or satellite raster imagery, we’re happy to work with you to see how it could be displayed in Lens. 

The first option is as a web map tile service (WMTS), which we can add to your Lens account for a setup fee - reach out to us at lens@upstream.tech for a quote. This imagery will then be listed in the date dropdown along with the public imagery and any commercial imagery you’ve ordered through Lens. 

The second format we accept is truecolor imagery GeoTIFFs for your properties, which may require a setup and/or storage fees. To incorporate your GeoTIFFS into Lens, please ensure that they confirm to the following specifications:

  • Web Mercator projection
  • Includes georeferencing metadata 
  • Data must be 8-bit unsigned integers
  • Any pixels missing data must have the value “0” for all bands.
  • All contiguous imagery with the same capture time should be combined into a single mosaic
  • Multiple images captured over non-continuous areas on the same date should be considered separate and shared as individual GeoTIFFs.
  • The capture time must be included in a separate CSV file, with the first column including the file name only (ex: “file_name.tif”) and second column for capture time displayed in an ISO format (ex: “2020-05-01T).

We do not guarantee storage for your files, so we recommend keeping your own copy of this imagery. If storage services would be useful, please reach out and we can discuss how we can provide a solution to meet your needs.