The exported TIFFs from Earth Engine to my drive look corrupted

Question

I am trying to export some images from the Earth Engine using Export.image.toDrive but it seems that all the files that I generate look corrupted.

When I mean corrupted, it means that if I open them with any viewer like Photoshop, Preview, etc, they look all black with lines (sample image at the bottom). Also I tried to open them with OpenCv in Python and the images did not have sense (they have three channels, but the number in the channels make no sense at all).

I looked for several examples online where people where exporting images and I couldn't find any difference with my code. Additionally, if I plot on the map of the Earth Engine the data seems to be fine. So I guess that I am doing something wrong with the exportation but I can't get it.

The procedure I follow is the following.

1. I select an area of the map with the square tool.
2. I run the script.
3. I go to task and export some of the layers that appear there.
4. I go to Drive and download the file to open it.
5. File is corrupted :(.

code snippet

var s2 = ee.ImageCollection('COPERNICUS/S2') // Level-C1 (TOA), for Level-2A (BOA) use 'COPERNICUS/S2_SR'
  .filterBounds(geometry)
  .filter(ee.Filter.lessThanOrEquals('CLOUDY_PIXEL_PERCENTAGE', 50))
  .filter(ee.Filter.date('2020-01-01', '2020-01-10'))
  
var clip_all = function(img){
  return img.clip(geometry)
}

var s2_clip = s2.map(clip_all)

var s2_list = s2_clip.toList(s2_clip.size())

var n = s2_list.size().getInfo()

for (var i = 0; i < n; i++){
  var img = ee.Image(s2_list.get(i))
 
  var rgb = img.select('B2','B3', 'B4')//.float()
  var date = img.date().format('yyyyMMdd').getInfo()
  Map.addLayer(img, {bands: ['B4', 'B3', 'B2'], max: 5048}, 'Image_'+date)

  //export
  Export.image.toDrive({
  image: rgb,
  description: 'COPERNICUS_RGB'+ date,
  scale: 30,
  region: geometry, 
  maxPixels: 1e10,
  fileNamePrefix: 'exampleExport',
  folder: 'test_earthengine_2'
})
}

some variations that I tried:

• using another scale 30-->10, the same.
• adding float to the line var rgb = img.select('B2','B3', 'B4').float(), no changes.

I wonder if the problem is that the export can take really long time and the things that appear in my drive still need some processing? (I already waited for 8 hours and the files did not seem to change on my drive.)

When I mean corrupted this are the kind of images that I am obtaining:

Answer 1

Most likely, the image editing tools you are using are not expecting floating-point color channel (band) values, but integer. Floating-point color data is unusual outside of scientific (and sometimes game) computing, and many image editing or viewing programs do not support it.

You can use Image.visualize to convert the image to RGB, in the same way that Map.addLayer does for you implicitly.

Replace your line

  var rgb = img.select('B2','B3', 'B4')

with

  var rgb = img.visualize({bands: ['B4', 'B3', 'B2'], max: 5048});

Notice that these are exactly the same options you pass to Map.addLayer!