About EEDL and Installation

What is EEDL?

EEDL provides simple functionality to download small or large volumes of data from Earth Engine. It combines the functionality several packages into one, making eedl easier and more stream-lined than working with many individual components to download data from Earth Engine.

Required Access and Configuration

In addition to installing the Python package for EEDL (below), EEDL requires the following:

  1. An Earth Engine Account:

    You need to have an active account on Google Earth Engine.

  2. You need to authenticate your Earth Engine account in the copy of Python you use for EEDL

    EEDL will attempt to detect that Earth Engine isn’t authenticated and start the sign-in flow, but you may find it easier to handle manually before running EEDL for the first time. See the Earth Engine documentation on auth for more. EEDL will install the Earth Engine client for you though - no need to install it separately, but you will need to authenticate it after installing EEDL if you have not already done so.

  3. Either a Google Cloud Storage bucket in the same Google Account, configured for public reads or the Google Drive client installed on the same device as EEDL.

    EEDL tracks and downloads pieces of your images through the export process, but it can currently still only use the options Earth Engine has available for exports - that is, Earth Engine can export to Google Cloud Storage buckets, or to Google Drive. See our documentation on export locations for more considerations, but you need at least one of these items in order to use EEDL.

How to install EEDL

The package is still in development and we have not yet published to PyPI (pip) or conda, but have built infrastructure for both. Current installation is to download the GitHub repository then run python setup.py install

EEDL is tested on Python 3.8-3.12 on Windows and Linux with both standard CPython and Anaconda distributions. EEDL is pure Python, but depends on GDAL, which has numerous compiled C++ dependencies. We have been told it works on MacOS and plan to provide an example of using it in Google Colab notebooks as well.

Windows

Windows users may want to use Anaconda, or see this writeup about installing GDAL and other spatial packages on Windows.

After installing GDAL, EEDL can be installed into your environment from PyPI with python -m pip install eedl.

Linux

Linux users should follow the GDAL installation guide and 1) Ensure that the gdal-bin and gdal-dev packages are installed and 2) The gdal version they install for Python matches the gdal version of the system packages (ogrinfo --version). We don’t pin a version of GDAL to allow for this workflow. Further details in the GDAL documentation.

After installing GDAL, EEDL can be installed into your environment from PyPI with python -m pip install eedl.