Make 0 values transparent or white on Google Earth Engine

Question

I plotted a raster onto Google Earth Engine, with a colour palette, and created a legend as shown.

// Pull the package from the GitHub repo which stores colour palettes to be used in GEE
// See https://github.com/gee-community/ee-palettes for more info
var palettes = require('users/gena/packages:palettes');

// Choose the yellow, orange, red colour palette with 9 classes
var palette = palettes.colorbrewer.YlOrRd[9];
var vis = {min: 0, max: 335, palette: palette};

// Add a raster layer and enable the colour palette
Map.addLayer(image, {min: 0, max: 335, palette: palette});

// Creates a color bar thumbnail image for use in legend from the given color palette
function makeColorBarParams(palette) {
  return {
    bbox: [0, 0, 1, 0.1],
    dimensions: '100x10',
    format: 'png',
    min: 0,
    max: 1,
    palette: palette,
  };
}

// Create the colour bar for the legend
var colorBar = ui.Thumbnail({
  image: ee.Image.pixelLonLat().select(0),
  params: makeColorBarParams(vis.palette),
  style: {stretch: 'horizontal', margin: '0px 8px', maxHeight: '24px'},
});

// Create a panel with three numbers for the legend
var legendLabels = ui.Panel({
  widgets: [
    ui.Label(vis.min, {margin: '4px 8px'}),
    ui.Label(
        ((vis.max-vis.min) / 2+vis.min),
        {margin: '4px 8px', textAlign: 'center', stretch: 'horizontal'}),
    ui.Label(vis.max, {margin: '4px 8px'})
  ],
  layout: ui.Panel.Layout.flow('horizontal')
});

// Legend title
var legendTitle = ui.Label({
  value: 'Carbon (tons C)',
  style: {fontWeight: 'bold'}
});

// Add the legendPanel to the map
var legendPanel = ui.Panel([legendTitle, colorBar, legendLabels]);
Map.add(legendPanel);

The issue with this solution is that 0 values are included as the lightest shade in my colour palette, but I'd like them excluded (either as transparent or white). Is there a way this can be done?

Answer 1

You can mask out those pixels using updateMask, so the pixels with zeros appear transparent in the visualization. Try inserting the following line before the Map.addLayer(...).

image = image.updateMask(image.neq(0));

Answer 2

Just for completeness - in addition to the previous answer (which works fine), you can also use .selfMask():

var maskedImg = image.selfMask()