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I'm trying to download all the available Planet imagery for a site in California by cropping a subarea. I can see there's 112 assets of type REOrthoTile or PSOrthoTile for this site using the stats endpoint. I follow the procedure in the docs about activating & downloading assets, yet I can only download 40 of the 112 images. I get the following error:

{"field": {}, "general": [{"message": "Download quota has been exceeded."}]}

The documentation talks about rate limits, but I can't find any information on the download quota: https://www.planet.com/docs/reference/data-api/api-mechanics/#rate-limits

The question is -- how to find out whether/what download quotas apply? Is that something one can get programmatically by querying the API (so to be used in an automated client that is mindful of the quota)?

More info on the asset I'm trying to download:

AOI: {"coordinates": [[[-117.7070372256684, 34.08932328386836], [-117.69617937433158, 34.08932328386836], [-117.69617937433158, 34.08033071613165], [-117.7070372256684, 34.08033071613165], [-117.7070372256684, 34.08932328386836]]], "type": "Polygon"}

item ID: 20151205_192708_1154812_RapidEye-2

item type: REOrthoTile

asset type: analytic

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  • What is your question? Have you tried contacting Planet Labs?
    – Midavalo ♦
    Commented May 1, 2017 at 20:06
  • Thanks for the quick reply! Just edited my question to make it more specific. I haven't contacted Planet -- I understand that they offer official support just for paying customers, not researchers getting free access to the data.
    – Adrian Albert
    Commented May 1, 2017 at 20:10

1 Answer 1

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There is a quota of 20 downloads per-day with Explorer accounts. You can view usage on your account page, in the organizations section: https://www.planet.com/account.

When using the API, a 429 error will be returned if you exceed your daily quota.

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  • Thanks! I was able to find the usage information in my account page. I also contacted Planet Labs to ask about this download quota. I'm actually downloading much less data than the quota limit, since I'm only pulling small sub-areas of interest using the gdal.Warp/vsicurl method in the docs. All in all it's about 7MB, not the 2GB/day. However it seems that the quota system considers the full tiles from which the sub-areas are downloaded (which are ~200MB each), so that's why I'm getting over the quota limit. Do you have any suggestions as to how to download many small scattered areas ?
    – Adrian Albert
    Commented May 2, 2017 at 14:17
  • Unfortunately, It's not possible for Planet to distinguish between a request to download an entire image and a VSI curl request to only download some bytes from an image. This means that while you save on download times and file size, you are still counted as having downloaded the full image when you use the VSI curl technique.
    – bosth
    Commented May 2, 2017 at 14:23
  • I see. Thanks for the clarification, that's helpful for me to rethink my sampling strategy. Would it make sense to apply for Planet's Research and Education program for this data? That is, does the quota increase under that program as opposed to the Open California one?
    – Adrian Albert
    Commented May 2, 2017 at 14:38
  • I suggest applying although I'm not familiar with how the quotas will change.
    – bosth
    Commented May 2, 2017 at 15:45

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