A Visual is one complete workflow: an Area + an Instrument + one or more Insights, computed on the imagery you filtered. This page is the full reference for the guided workflow; for a fast first run see Your First Visual in Three Minutes.
Click New visual (the play button) at the top of the left rail. The panel opens under Workspace › Visuals with three steps.
Step 1 — Area Of Interest #
- Pick one under Saved Areas (the search box filters by name), or create one on the spot with Draw on map / Upload area.
- Once selected, the map centers on the area automatically — with its Zones displayed if it has any.
- From the completed step you can still edit the area with the pencil icon, and toggle its geophysical layers (layers icon) or geochemical dataset points (database icon) on the Globe — see Zones, Geochemical & Geophysical Data.
- Saving the area is recommended: private imagery and ordering only work on saved Areas.
Step 2 — Instrument #
Instruments are grouped by family, with tabs to show All / Public / Private / Custom sources and a search box. What the categories mean:
- Public — instruments that are publicly available, owned by space agencies, with automatic, dynamic live filtering: you set the filters and the platform searches the archive on the spot.
- Three special public cases — the hyperspectral PRISMA (Italian Space Agency), Hyperion (NASA) and EnMAP (German Space Agency). You can filter them like the others — they’re the only instruments that show their available-imagery count on the card — but each agency has its own process, availability limits and a cap on how many orders you can place. The final image arrives from a couple of hours up to a few days, on the agency’s timeline.
- Private — instruments owned by private companies, available through our marketplace; ordering their imagery costs money. Private instruments show a lock and only work on saved areas — if yours isn’t saved yet, a banner offers Save this area / Edit in the Area step.
- Custom — instruments created by your own company (not orderable from the marketplace), when your company has them.
Instruments without local coverage offer Filter imagery (to search their archive) or Create imagery order — the order window opens with the instrument and area preselected.
Step 3 — Insights #
- Two tabs: Insights and Stacks, each with its count.
- Insights are grouped by category — expand a category and tick what you need, or use the per-category select-all. Filter by ownership (All / Public / Private), search, or narrow by insight type.
- The selection chip shows how many you picked. Save as Stack turns the current selection into a reusable bundle; Clear all resets it.
- Need something that doesn’t exist yet? Create insight opens the insight builder scoped to your chosen instrument.
Step 4 — Filter imagery #
Click Filter imagery and define which scenes to search: date range, months, cloud cover and more — the full options are covered in Filtering Imagery. Then Apply & Search.
Step 5 — Pick scenes… and more than visualize #
The Scenes panel lists everything that matched, with acquisition date, cloud and coverage chips — and visualizing is only one of the things you can do from here:
- Preview a scene first — the preview always shows true color, no matter which insights you selected. It’s the cheap way to confirm a scene is the right one before rendering anything.
- Check its metadata — everything the scene carries, before committing to it.
- Visualize a single scene, several scenes separately, or all of them as a mosaic.
- Export directly — download a scene without visualizing it at all.
- Export the raw data — every band of the selected imagery, clipped to your Area of Interest, with none of the selected insights applied. The full spectral cube, ready for your own tools.
Once rendered, the run card summarizes the result and keeps every re-run one click away (see Scenes, Run Cards & Re-runs).
After the render #
With the layer on the Globe you can open Active layer analytics for stretching, palettes and the analytical toolset, check Metadata and AOI DATA, or save the whole thing as a workflow — see Saved Workflows.