**European Economic Area (EEA) developers**

> [!NOTE]
> If your billing address is in the European Economic Area, effective on 8 July 2025, the [Google
> Maps Platform EEA Terms of Service](https://cloud.google.com/terms/maps-platform/eea) will apply to your use of the Services. [Learn more](https://developers.google.com/maps/comms/eea/faq.md.txt). In addition, certain content from the Map Tiles API will no longer be returned. [Learn more](https://developers.google.com/maps/comms/eea/map-tiles.md.txt).

![Satellite Tile overview](https://developers.google.com/static/maps/documentation/tile/images/satellite-tile-example.png)Satellite image tiles are a form of orthophotography. They're
images captured by both satellite and airborne cameras, and they deliver
top-down (nadir or near-nadir) imagery of the earth.

## Getting satellite tiles

You can begin making satellite tile requests after you get a session token.
Because the session token applies to the entire session, you don't have to
specify the map options with your tile requests.

The following code sample demonstrates a typical session token request for
satellite tiles.

```json
curl -X POST -d '{
  "mapType": "satellite",
  "language": "en-US",
  "region": "US"
}' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
"https://tile.googleapis.com/v1/createSession?key=YOUR_API_KEY
```

You get satellite tiles by making an HTTPS GET request, as shown in the
following example.

```json
curl "https://tile.googleapis.com/v1/2dtiles/z/x/y?session=YOUR_SESSION_TOKEN&key=YOUR_API_KEY"
```

## Example tile request

Consider the following code example, that requests a single satellite tile at
zoom level 15, with x and y coordinates of (6294, 13288).

```json
curl "https://tile.googleapis.com/v1/2dtiles/15/6294/13288?session=YOUR_SESSION_TOKEN&key=YOUR_API_KEY" --output /tmp/example_tile.png
```

There is no response message from the server in this example. Instead, the tile
just downloads to a local file.

![Satellite Tile response](https://developers.google.com/static/maps/documentation/tile/images/satellite-example-2.png)

For information about response message headers, see
[Pre-Fetching, Caching, or Storage of Content](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/tile/policies.md.txt#pre-fetching,-caching,-or-storage-of-content).