Published on Apr 11, 2020 | Bikesh Bade | 12514 Views

Google Earth Engine lets you export images, map tiles, tables and videos from Earth Engine. The exports can only be sent to your Google Drive account, to Google Cloud Storage or to a new Earth Engine asset. Satellite images are large in size so your free drive storage will fill up in no time and then you are a force to buy the storage which is not cheap if you are living in developing countries. But we can take advantage of the google python API to export the images, image collections directly to your local computer without uploading to your drive.

The Google Earth Engine (GEE) Python API facilitates interacting with Earth Engine servers using the Python programming language. It is available as a Python package that can be installed locally or within the cloud and accessed from a command-line interpreter or within a Jupyter notebook.

Set up Python API for GEE and continue following 

Step 1

The Python API package is called ee. It must also be initialized for every new session and script.

# import Google earth engine module
import ee

#Authenticate the Google earth engine with google account
ee.Initialize()

Step 2 

Load the Image or ImageCollection you like. In this example, the Landsat 8 image is Loaded to download

#load image
MyImage  =  ee.ImageCollection('LANDSAT/LC08/C01/T1_SR')

Step 3

Create a Python function to get the download link:

#create function to download the image or imagecollection as you desire
def downloader(ee_object,region): 
    try:
        #download image
        if isinstance(ee_object, ee.image.Image):
            print('Its Image')
            url = ee_object.getDownloadUrl({
                    'scale': 30,
                    'crs': 'EPSG:4326',
                    'region': region
                })
            return url
        
        #download imagecollection
        elif isinstance(ee_object, ee.imagecollection.ImageCollection):
            print('Its ImageCollection')
            ee_object_new = ee_object.mosaic()
            url = ee_object_new.getDownloadUrl({
                    'scale': 30,
                    'crs': 'EPSG:4326',
                    'region': region
                })
            return url
    except:
        print("Could not download")

Step 4

Select the region or Area of Interest

geometry = ee.Geometry.Rectangle([80.058, 26.347, 82.201, 28.447])

region = geometry.toGeoJSONString()#region must in JSON format

path = downloader(MyImage,region)#call function

print(path)#print the download URL

Final step:

Copy the URL and paste it in any browser, the file will be downloaded.

Note that Google has a limitation of 1 GB per download.