Cloud Assets

Earth Engine assets (e.g. images, tables) may be legacy assets (i.e. not associated with a Cloud Project) or assets associated with a Google Cloud Project. This guide describes how to use the Asset Manager to upload and/or use assets associated with a Cloud Project.

Cloud Asset Manager

The Cloud Asset Manager contains the Cloud Assets section, the Legacy Assets section and the Add A Project button.

Cloud Asset Manager
Figure 1. Cloud Asset Manager of the Earth Engine Code Editor.

Cloud Assets

The Cloud Assets section contains assets which belong to any of the Cloud Projects that are pinned to the Asset Manager. The Cloud Project which is selected for the Code Editor session (as indicated in the top-right of the Code Editor) is here by default. Additional projects may be pinned by choosing the Add A Project button and selecting a project in the Select a Cloud Project dialog. The assets within these projects will be displayed in an initially expanded zippy, with nested folders initially collapsed.

Legacy Assets

Legacy assets are assets associated with your Earth Engine account before Earth Engine's Cloud integration.

Add a Project

Clicking the Add a Project button will open the Select a Cloud Project dialog.

Select a Project dialog
Figure 2. Select a Cloud Project dialog.

This dialog which will present a drop down to select a Cloud Project and show the Earth Engine assets that are present in that project. Projects which you have pinned previously are displayed as Earth Engine Enabled Projects. Selecting a Cloud Project in the drop down and clicking Select will pin the project to the Cloud Assets section and display the assets contained within the project.

Selecting a project that is already pinned will provide the option to unpin the project instead.

Uploading assets

Upload assets using the Upload Assets button. The uploaded assets by default will be associated with the project selected in the Code Editor. If you want the new asset(s) to be associated with a different project, select a different project through the project picker provided by the upload dialog.

Managing assets

Assets can be managed through the Code Editor Asset Manager tab, the command line, a client library (for example, ee.data.getAsset) or via the REST API directly.

Managing asset permissions

To give other users access to your assets for the purpose of reading, writing or full administrative control, you may set permissions on the asset, the project or both. See the Access Control page for details.

Accessing assets

Asset paths are of the form projects/${PROJECT_NAME}/assets/${ASSET_NAME}. These paths are used in client library constructors, when doing exports through one of the client libraries, at ingest or upload time and in REST API calls.

Public assets

Images in the public catalog can be accessed from paths like projects/earthengine-legacy/assets/path/to/asset/asset-id. For example, here's a Landsat scene:

projects/earthengine-public/assets/LANDSAT/LC08/C01/T1_RT/LC08_001004_20140524

Note that PROJECT_NAME in this example is earthengine-public. These paths can be passed directly to constructors such as Image, ImageCollection or FeatureCollection. You also pass asset paths to the REST API. Here is a very simple example from the REST quickstart.

Personal assets

To access an Earth Engine asset stored in a project you own or have permission to view, set PROJECT_NAME to the ID of the project that owns the asset. For example:

projects/my-ee-enabled-project-id/assets/my-asset-id

In this example, my-ee-enabled-project-id is the name of a project through which assets have previously been uploaded or created. See the Projects page for more information on how to enable the Earth Engine API on a Cloud Project.

Legacy assets

Legacy assets are assets stored in legacy users/ or projects/ folders. When accessing these assets, the PROJECT_NAME is earthengine-legacy. For example:

projects/earthengine-legacy/assets/users/user-name/my-asset-id

Accessing images in Cloud Storage

You can access Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs (COGs) directly from a Cloud Storage bucket using ee.Image.loadGeoTIFF(). You can also create COG-backed Earth Engine assets as described in this REST API example.