The availability of satellite imagery represents a major new frontier for investigative journalism, and has exposed everything from the decimation of homes in Gaza to mass graves in occupied Ukraine and the link between corporate deforestation and disastrous forest fires in the Amazon.

However, we tend to see remote sensing data like this in major media, and access to these images — as well as the growing list of image providers and advanced analysis options — can seem intimidating for newcomers to the field, especially in the Global South.

Experts say there is a perception among many under-resourced newsrooms that this kind of forensic evidence is limited by exclusivity deals or advanced data and search skills, and that private satellite vendors don’t welcome requests for free data from outlets they don’t know.

But the reality is much different. Despite some limits and case restrictions, there is a free treasure trove of compelling visual evidence out there that is going unused by many watchdog journalists.

GIJN interviewed two leading journalists who previously worked at private satellite imagery providers on the topic: Laura Kurtzberg, a data visualization instructor at Florida International University and a former applications engineer at Descartes Labs, and Daniel Wolfe, a graphics reporter at The Washington Post, and a former data visualization engineer at Planet Labs.

The good news, they say, is that:

• In most cases, you probably don’t need to contact anyone, or pay for anything, to acquire medium-resolution remote sensing images of the place your investigation needs, and at least roughly from the time it’s needed.
• For an important investigation requiring a future custom image, satellite companies, in principle, are open to requests to “task” a satellite to turn and image a particular spot you’re investigating – and Global South reporters actually have a better chance of success, due to lower commercial tasking demand for satellites overflying the southern hemisphere (more on that below.)
• Unless you’re doing additional geospatial analysis, you don’t need special data or computer skills to find or download satellite images — or even screen out cloud cover or create custom time lapses.
• Marketing teams at private satellite companies often send very high-resolution images of major international news events — such as earthquakes or floods — to the email inboxes of reporters who are signed up to those companies’ press lists, without being asked — sometimes with expert analysis provided.
• While some private firms do have limited embargo or first-use arrangements with media partners on particular topics, they generally welcome properly-formatted requests from unfamiliar newsrooms — and are often delighted to assist journalists in countries where their images have never appeared before.
• There are several great image databases to explore for existing images, including public portals like NASA WorldView and private libraries like Planet Explorer. And reporters can explore the dozens of access, analysis, and advanced source combination options in online guides, such as GIJN’s comprehensive “Resources for Finding and Using Satellite Images.” However, for newcomers, experts say just two easy-to-use open source tools  — Google Earth Pro and, especially, the increasingly powerful Sentinel Hub EO Browser app — are all you need for most sat image use-cases.

“I think that, for the average reporter, Google Earth and EO Browser are the only tools you really need to get free satellite images,” says Kurtzberg. “So investing time to practice and learn to use those two tools covers most of your bases. You should even check these databases for very recent images, as there might be an image there that is free of clouds that happened to pass over your location of interest in the past couple of days.”

She adds: “But if you can’t find the image you need on those two tools, then it would be good to have a pre-established relationship with someone at a private imagery company.”

Choosing Free, User-Friendly Satellite Image Tools

The need for free access was well illustrated by a 2019 GIJN profile of Botswana’s nonprofit INK Centre for Investigative Journalism, in which co-founder Joel Konopo revealed that editors took cuts to their modest salaries to pay for a single private satellite image to verify their investigation into the then-president’s private country lodge.

This image from DigitalGlobe, via South Africa’s Swift Geospatial Solutions, showed extensive development at the private lodge of a former Botswana president. A 2019 investigation by Botswana’s INK investigative nonprofit revealed the use of state resources for the new development.

Kurtzberg notes that their lodge image was a good example of the kind of picture no newsroom, today, should have to pay for, or even request. That’s because the sought-after image was not date-dependent, and involved easy-to-identify landmarks (large buildings) that a free-access, medium-resolution satellite like the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 would capture well.

Wolfe says first-time users should start with an assessment of needs for their investigation: whether the date or the resolution of the image is the priority.

“Typically, your editor will want the perfect image: a sharp image or a recent image, or both,” he says. “Maybe you are looking at stadiums the Chinese government is funding in parts of Africa, and you want to see the development. But you can go a long way if you know: When does it matter, and how sharp the image needs to be? A flood plain doesn’t need to be high res. If it’s before-imagery of topography, the trade-off can favor a clear image, because the image can be from any prior time.”

He adds: “Things get more tricky when you’re looking at a very recent event. But, oftentimes, it is possible to get free imagery that’s close enough to the time that matters.”

The public satellite constellations Wolfe first checks are NASA’s low-to-medium resolution LandSat — “sort of town-level resolution” — and the medium-resolution Sentinel-2, which shows about 10 meters per pixel. But he says newcomers likely don’t need to worry about which satellite source to choose, because open source tools do the work for you: Google Earth pre-selects the best available image from a mix of satellites, and EO Browser defaults to the excellent Sentinel-2 service, and also has LandSat and other image sources in its library that you can select with a single click.

“If you create a free account in NASA WorldView, it gives you a lot, as it has access to all of NASA’s data feeds, and you can treat it like Google Maps,” he explains. “You can use the ‘Add Layer’ button to look for a disaster you care about, but you can also search for the underlying data, and use things like its Fire and Thermal Anomalies feature to corroborate reporting about fires or explosions.”

The ‘Fire and Thermal Anomalies” feature on NASA Worldview tool shows major fires occurring daily. Image: Screenshot, NASA

Wolfe adds: “But it may have more features than some reporters need. For people starting out, I’d recommend using Sentinel Hub.”

In addition to the user-friendly nature of its dashboard tool EO Browser, a major advantage of the Sentinel Hub program, he says, is the frequent “revisit time” of the Sentinel-2 constellation it highlights: imaging the same places around the world every five to six days.

“The satellites are spaced apart such that, day after day, every region is covered, more or less, and images are taken at roughly the same time of day, for reasons of comparable shadow, etcetera,” Wolfe notes.

“Bottom line: first learn the point-and-click interfaces of Google Earth and EO Browser — they’re excellent, but it’s still difficult to navigate a tool like EO Browser for the first time live, on deadline,” Kurtzberg explains.

(Reporters with advanced computer skills can dig deeper into Sentinel Hub data with this collection of Javascript code custom scripts.)

Carl Churchill, a graphics reporter at The Wall Street Journal, told GIJN that one useful free source not included in EO Browser is the GOES satellite, operated by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “It’s a geostationary satellite that takes a giant snapshot of the entire western hemisphere every 10 minutes,” he explains. In addition to the easy, free download options for this satellite via NASA Worldview, Churchill’s tip for searching GOES is to also check out Brazil’s excellent platform viewer.

Tips for Using Open Source Satellite Tools

• Try the easy point-and-click, zoom, and time-slider features of Google Earth Pro to orient your investigation, and to inspect and download images of large objects. Last year, the Financial Times used Google Earth to show that Chinese authorities had altered or removed Arabic-style architectural features on 74% of mosques in a sample of 2,323 mosques across China, between 2018 and 2023. “If you simply need to prove something exists, Google Earth is a great option — where you don’t need a particular time stamp or something from yesterday,” says Kurtzberg. “You can type in coordinates if you want, but most reporters just zoom in, like on Google Maps.There is a great time-slider bar at the top which you can scroll to go back in time. But be sure to download and use the desktop version, not the browser.”
• Save time curating usable images with EO Browser’s remarkable cloud function. If you click on “Advanced search” beneath the Sentinel-2 box in the tool’s main menu, you’ll find a “Max cloud coverage” slider bar. If you click, say, three-quarters along the bar, it will automatically exclude all images from your date range that have more than about 25% cloud cover. Then just select the unobstructed image you want, or check off boxes in a set, download, and use the attribution listed to credit the provider.

Adjusted here to 80% on the slider, EO Browser’s “Max cloud coverage” tool is set to only show images of Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos with less than 20% cloud cover. Image: Screenshot, Sentinel Hub EO Browser

• Practice on open source tools by searching for your own house, and searching for before-and-after images of things that have changed in your area. “Practice really helps here,” Wolfe notes. “Look at changes you know have happened in your own neighborhood. For example, I would notice how our local utility deals with water mains in my neighborhood.”
• Compare key dates, or date ranges, from your investigation against EO Browser’s digital calendar. The calendar automatically highlights the exact dates – often once or twice per week — on which satellite imagery was acquired for the location in your search.

Sentinel Hub’s smart calendar reveals the dates when images of a location were captured and selected. Image: Screenshot, EO Browser

• Plan for likely future images in the coming week with tool-based weather forecasts. Sentinel Hub includes a “Clear sky confidence” feature which tells you the likely weather conditions on the days when satellites will next image a location you select.
• Experiment with EO Browser’s distance and labels features. Unlike some other platforms, this tool allows you to easily measure distances and areas in meters, rather than degrees of Earth’s surface, with its “ruler” button on the right-hand menu. And you can orient yourself, or your audience, by clicking on “labels” or “roads” under the tab at the top right corner, which populates your image with town and place names — and you can mark points with the Pin tab below.

EO Browser’s “ruler” tool, here showing the distance (1,700 meters) between runways at Murtala Muhammed airport in Lagos, Nigeria. Image: Screenshot, EO Browser

• While using features like false color and light frequency bands can be complicated, making time-lapse sat image slideshows is surprisingly easy. Practice creating a time-lapse GIF of long-term change, such as major construction, using these steps:

⇒ Make sure you’ve created a free EO Browser account.

⇒Type the area name or coordinates into the search bar, and search.

⇒ Click “Visualize” on a thumbnail in the main menu to see the image, and refine the tile boundary.

⇒ Scroll to the “Create timelapse” film reel icon, and select start and end dates

⇒ Deselect thumbnails with cloud obstruction. Tip: make sure you don’t confuse clouds with smoke on these small images, and deselect wildfire or conflict images by mistake.

⇒ Choose your frames-per-second with the “SPEED” icon at the bottom. “You can control how fast the fade is between images, and you can delay the last frame for your reader to really focus on it,” Wolfe advises. “Then you can tell it to export as an MPEG.”

⇒ Preview with “Play,” and download the GIF.

Dealing with Commercial Providers

However, if your investigation does need an image from a specific moment in time, or a clear view of a vehicle-sized object, you’ll need a high, one-meter-or-less resolution image. Besides military satellites, those are only gathered by commercial vendors like Planet Labs, Maxar Technologies, Airbus Earth Observation, and BlackSky. These providers can also help customers with finding date and time-specific past images, and tasking for future projects.

“If you need to verify that the president’s car was at a certain location at a certain time, then, yes, you may need to reach out to a press officer at a private company,” Wolfe explains. “They have marketing teams whose job it is, in part, to anticipate and create image assets before reporters even ask for them. So if it’s something like the Taiwan earthquake, we don’t have to go anywhere, because they’re emailing us that material already if we’re on their email list.”

Wolfe stresses that marketing and press staff at satellite firms tend to be receptive to media requests for free imagery, and often anticipate press needs.

“The media programs at these companies generally want to give this data to journalists, because they know they’ll be credited in their stories,” he says. “Remember that a lot of the people at these providers get into the business because they believe in the mission — that, rather than being about surveillance, this is helpful to the world in the right hands. When I was at Planet, we’d hear from people saying ‘We are doing a search and rescue; our friend’s plane went down in this forest; can you send us imagery of the area?’ And I can tell you we would drop everything to help them. Importance and need make a difference.”

And small newsrooms should definitely reach out.

Says Wolfe: “With press requests from smaller outlets, I never thought: “Well, they’re not The New York Times, so I’m not going to look into this.’ From the press office perspective, it’s easy to download the image and email it to you.”

The pride these providers have in supporting investigations is evident in story gallery pages, such as this one from Maxar, and statements like this, from Planet: “Every day, our data brings to life breaking news stories and investigative reporting in remote and often dangerous locales.”

In addition, Maxar’s WeatherDesk provided data maps associated with the conflict, such as this map showing a sharp deficit in crop planting, shown in red, in 2022, compared with the pre-war period. Image: Screenshot, Maxar

Kurtzberg points out that, in her experience in the satellite industry, there is a slight tension between the default desire of marketing officers to assist on stories, and the desire of their managers to see a brand benefit for the company.

For that reason, she advises that, in emailed requests, reporters from smaller newsrooms should briefly describe their audience reach, or their relative prominence within their media market, or their journalistic independence and accolades.

“When I used to work for a satellite imagery company, and hear about so-and-so journalist wanting to use our images, I always thought ‘Great! Let’s do it!” but then I’d hear from management: ‘OK, but what’s our benefit?’” she recalls. “So say [to the satellite imagery provide]: ‘We have X-many readers’ if you have a lot, or ‘We are widely republished,’ or ‘We have X impact in our country.’ If it’s a detailed request, and you say you’re the most popular or most awarded outlet in X small country, they may take a second look at your request.”

Tips for Getting Free Commercial Satellite Images

• • Join press lists and newsletter groups. Planet actively invites reporters to “Join our press list for the latest updates or email us for media inquiries at press@planet.com.”
  • Establish a relationship with key press officers before seeking sensitive or date-specific free images. Officials can be found via addresses such as media@maxar.com and images@planet.com, while Wolfe says leading public media officers in the field include Stephen A. Wood at Maxar, Anne Pellegrino at Planet, and Colleen Frerichs at ICEYE. Find direct email addresses via simple Google searches for media office press releases.” Drop them a line, explaining what you do and who you reach, and something like ‘Someday, I may need to collaborate with your service for an important story — could you tell me the procedure for requesting high-res images?’’ says Kurtzberg. “Do it early, because, if you try to do that groundwork of reaching out for the first time for breaking news, you might be too late.”
    
    Tip for smaller outlets: Accompany your initial introductory reach-out with a simple, non-urgent image request, with coordinates, for a real story you’re working on that does not require a date-specific picture. Once published, send a copy of the story with any supplied image to the officer with a thank you note.
  • Even though the needed attribution is clearly provided in image releases, be sure to verify the language: Include in any initial request a line like: “For the future: what is the exact wording you would like us to use when crediting your company for images?” Kurtzberg explains that this kind of question serves to signal your awareness of the company’s attribution needs.
  • Don’t “fish” with general subject requests. Give press officers something to work with. “If you just send an email saying ‘Hey I’m really interested in illegal mining in X region, what do you have?,’ they are not going to reply to you,” Wolfe explains. “But if you say ‘We know that mine tailings (waste from mining operations) seem to be going into X river, according to reporting we’ve done. Can you see and verify that mine issue there?’ In that case, they may be able to help.”
    He adds: “If you only know the general area, but something they can look for in a time frame, that could work. If you say: ‘We’ve heard reports of violence in this general area last week, though we don’t know exactly where — but there are probably burn scars there,’ the companies can work with that, because they can run some basic analysis.”
  • Use GPS coordinates in your request, rather than place names or landmarks, if possible. “Coordinates are best,” Wolfe confirms. “If you have a latitude and longitude, give them that.” Tip: Find the coordinates with right-click above your target spot on Google Maps.

GPS coordinates that copy-to-clipboard after right-click on Google Maps are a major time-saver for reporters – from satellite image search to social media capture. Image: Screenshot, Google Maps

• • Be specific with the technical aspects of what you need — and what you don’t particularly need — from their image search. If the image doesn’t need to be crystal clear, then say so. “What these officers care about is the exact location, and clarity on the date and sharpness range you need,” he adds. “So give them a range of how low the resolution can be that would be acceptable for your story.”
  • Request that a satellite be tasked for a crucial, non-date-specific image. “Tasking is when the company tells the high-resolution satellite to move itself to get a photo of X area,” Wolfe explains. “Newsrooms in the Global South have a benefit here, because, in the northern hemisphere, there are tons of companies in line, paying to task images for commercial or competitive reasons. But there are not a lot of people using tasking in the southern hemisphere, so there are a lot of empty seats, essentially.” He adds: “If you have information that a person of interest has, say, a private runway in their backyard, in a hard to access area with instability, you could offer a lat-long, and try asking, say, Planet: ‘I’m looking to confirm this runway for an important story, and I notice that you don’t seem to have high-res data of this location. Could you task a satellite to take an image there? — it doesn’t matter what day; we just want to verify the runway.’ They may reply, ‘Sure, give us a week or two.’”
  • If you’re part of a large nonprofit or educational collaboration with a track record of community benefit, consider negotiating a free open-access arrangement for high-resolution images for your members. Kurtzberg says she is aware of at least one widely esteemed nonprofit journalism center that had secured free image access for all of its journalism fellows from a major private satellite imagery provider.
  • Specify “spatial” files in your request if you’re creating a map. According to The Wall Street Journal’s Churchill, it’s important to be clear about the file format you need — such as “spatial” files for maps — when communicating with press officers. “For instance, Maxar often only supplies huge folders of JPEGs, which are great, but if you want to, say, add it to QGIS and incorporate it into a map, you cannot do that,” Churchill explains. “JPEG lacks the information QGIS needs to georeference it. However, Planet usually offers that by default. File format is important. Remember: ‘geoTIFF’ is spatial.”
  • Follow up with a request for analysis help if needed. “It might be more tricky to reach out to the people doing the analysis, because it’s hard to know who is actually doing it,” says Wolfe. “In the case of Gaza, there will be one or two researchers dedicated to that analysis, and they might, say, send it on embargo to The New York Times, who get to publish first, and then anyone else can use that data.” He adds: “If they are a company like Planet, where they pride themselves on image analysis, you may want to ask them if analysis on a particular image is something they can share. If it’s a smart press person, they might say, ‘Oh, you’re looking at agriculture? You know, we can also tell you how much of this area was affected by X if you like.’” For analysis, Planet can connect reporters with a network of 3rd party experts that the company maintains.

“Try and be mindful of their time, just like you’d do with any source,” Wolfe concludes. “So communicate ‘This is what we’re doing; this story is important; this is how we intend to use the image; do you have imagery of this location at X time?’”

“The current use of satellite imagery we see in investigative journalism is just the tip of the iceberg of the opportunity,” says Andrew Lehren, director of investigative reporting at the CUNY Journalism School in New York City. “This is a powerful form of evidence that is largely freely available. We see it for natural disasters, sure — but there are so many topics that would benefit. Illegal construction; illicit pollution — almost any large-scale illicit thing that’s happening behind a fence you can now see. You don’t even need the big private companies now – you can just do it yourself, from your desktop.”

Rowan Philp is GIJN’s senior reporter. He was formerly chief reporter for South Africa’s Sunday Times. As a foreign correspondent, he has reported on news, politics, corruption, and conflict from more than two dozen countries around the world.