Planet Bulk Download

Hard-won reference for pulling PlanetScope imagery at scale with the Planet SDK v2. The SDK is thin: no retries, no batching, no awareness of cold-storage thaw, no scene grouping. You build all of that. This document is the part you will otherwise rediscover by burning a 17-hour batch job.

Architecture: three-phase pipeline

Split the job into search → activate → extract, each with its own JSONL cache, its own concurrency knob, and its own resume logic. The phases have completely different bottlenecks:

• search: cheap metadata calls, rate-limited client-side.
• activate: Planet-side cold-storage thaw queue, capped at ~10 cold scenes/min/account regardless of how many you request.
• extract: HTTP range reads via GDAL, network-bound at ~0.5s/patch on a 1.5km AOI.

Suggested layout: