Providers & licensing

Note

This page reproduces PROVIDERS.md from the repository (the text under the first heading below), followed by practical notes for the sources mapcv knows about. If the two ever differ, PROVIDERS.md is authoritative.

Imagery sources and licensing

mapcv is a tool, released under the MIT License without warranty. It does not provide imagery and grants no rights to any: the terms of the source you point it at are between you and its provider.

What mapcv does with imagery:

• Caching. Downloaded XYZ tiles stay in an on-disk cache for as long as the server’s caching headers allow (7 days when it sends none). imagery.cache: false turns the cache off.
• Requests. mapcv plan reports the number of tiles before anything is fetched. Generated configs use max_connections: 4; mapcv retries with backoff, honours Retry-After and names itself in its user agent.
• Credentials. A key in url_template never reaches the manifest, logs or messages: only the host is shown. Remote GeoTIFF, STAC and EOPF URLs cannot carry credentials, and private stores are not supported.
• Earth Engine (imagery.earth_engine) runs on your own account and Cloud project. mapcv asks for a fresh map URL each run and never writes it, or its map ID, anywhere.
• No Google Maps or OpenStreetMap tile presets. mapcv ships no presets for tile servers whose operators ask not to be bulk-downloaded. OpenStreetMap data (ODbL) works well as labels.

License and credit by source

Source	In mapcv	License and credit
Esri World Imagery, Topo, Street	esri_satellite, esri_topo, esri_street	Proprietary, under Esri’s terms of use. Credit: “Source: Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics, and the GIS User Community” (Topo and Street: “Sources: Esri and the GIS User Community”)
CARTO basemaps	cartodb_positron, cartodb_dark_matter	CARTO’s basemap terms; rendered maps, not imagery. Credit: “© OpenStreetMap contributors © CARTO”
Your own or a commercial tile service	url_template	Your agreement with the provider
Copernicus Sentinel-2 (EOPF Zarr, STAC COGs)	type: eopf_zarr, type: stac_cog	Free and open. Credit: “Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data [year]”
Google Earth Engine datasets	imagery.earth_engine (pip install "mapcv[gee]")	Your Earth Engine account and Cloud project (terms, quotas); each catalog dataset has its own license and citation
OpenStreetMap data (as labels)	labels.path	ODbL. Credit: “© OpenStreetMap contributors”; an adapted database is share-alike
OpenStreetMap tile servers	no preset	Their tile usage policy asks clients not to bulk-download
Google Maps imagery	no preset	See Migrating to 0.2

mapcv card writes the credit lines of the built-in sources into the dataset card.