Imagery and tiles

Beyond your own data, Icon Map can pull in external map services and imagery as layers.

WMS

The WMS layer connects to an OGC Web Map Service endpoint. Icon Map reads the service's capabilities so you can pick the layer and style, supply authentication if needed, and use click-to-identify (GetFeatureInfo) to query features. Layers in a different coordinate system are reprojected to fit the map.

Raster tiles

The Raster tiles layer adds tiled raster imagery from a range of sources:

  • XYZ tiles from a tile URL,
  • PMTiles or MBTiles archives,
  • COG (Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF), or
  • WMTS tiled services.

Sources can be a URL or a file in your OneLake. For a single, un-tiled picture, use the Image overlay layer instead.

Image overlay

The Image overlay layer places a single flat picture on the map — a PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF, BMP, or a plain (non-tiled) GeoTIFF — from a URL or a file in your OneLake. It's ideal for a scanned map, a floor plan, a site drawing, or an aerial photo that isn't already tiled.

If a GeoTIFF carries geographic information, Icon Map places it automatically at its real-world location. Otherwise you position it by hand while the layer is open for editing: choose a transform mode — Move, Rotate, Scale, or Distort — then drag the image or its corner handles on the map. Distort applies a true perspective warp, so you can rubber-sheet an unreferenced scan or drawing to line up with the map.

You can also apply GPU adjustments and effects: opacity, brightness, contrast, saturation, hue, sharpen, blur, edge-enhance, greyscale, and threshold.

Microsoft Planetary Computer

The Planetary Computer layer adds satellite and geospatial imagery from Microsoft Planetary Computer, including browsing available coverage and loading imagery for your area of interest.

Spectral indices

Beyond showing imagery, the Planetary Computer layer editor has a Spectral index section that turns raw bands into an analytic index - answering questions like "where is vegetation healthy?" or "where did the fire burn?". Icon Map builds the band-math request and the Planetary Computer tiler evaluates it server-side, so no imagery pixels are downloaded to compute the index.

Pick a built-in index or write a custom band-math expression:

Index Measures
NDVI Vegetation greenness / health
GNDVI Green vegetation (chlorophyll-sensitive)
NDWI Open water
NDMI Vegetation moisture content
NDBI Built-up / impervious surfaces
NBR Burn severity
EVI Enhanced vegetation (haze-resistant)
SAVI Soil-adjusted vegetation

Each index needs to know which bands play which role (red, near-infrared, and so on). Icon Map auto-selects a band layout for the common collections - Sentinel-2 L2A, Landsat 8-9 Collection 2 Level-2, and NAIP - or you can map roles to bands yourself with a custom layout.

You also control:

  • Value range (stretch) - the low and high index values mapped to the colour scale.
  • Colour scale - the ramp used to render the index.

The map legend shows the index ramp and its value range.

EVI and SAVI use constant coefficients that assume surface reflectance in the 0-1 range. Icon Map applies the collection's reflectance scaling automatically for these indices, so the values are correct without you having to rescale the bands by hand.

Vector tiles

The Vector tiles layer adds MVT or PMTiles vector tilesets from a URL or OneLake, and can optionally be joined to a data source so the tiles are styled by your data. To generate your own vector tilesets from OneLake files, see the Tileset Builder.

Next steps