ImageCollection Information and Metadata

As with Images, there are a variety of ways to get information about an ImageCollection. The collection can be printed directly to the console, but the console printout is limited to 5000 elements. Collections larger than 5000 images will need to be filtered before printing. Printing a large collection will be correspondingly slower. The following example shows various ways of getting information about image collections programmatically:

Code Editor (JavaScript)

// Load a Landsat 8 ImageCollection for a single path-row.
var collection = ee.ImageCollection('LANDSAT/LC08/C02/T1_TOA')
    .filter(ee.Filter.eq('WRS_PATH', 44))
    .filter(ee.Filter.eq('WRS_ROW', 34))
    .filterDate('2014-03-01', '2014-08-01');
print('Collection: ', collection);

// Get the number of images.
var count = collection.size();
print('Count: ', count);

// Get the date range of images in the collection.
var range = collection.reduceColumns(ee.Reducer.minMax(), ['system:time_start'])
print('Date range: ', ee.Date(range.get('min')), ee.Date(range.get('max')))

// Get statistics for a property of the images in the collection.
var sunStats = collection.aggregate_stats('SUN_ELEVATION');
print('Sun elevation statistics: ', sunStats);

// Sort by a cloud cover property, get the least cloudy image.
var image = ee.Image(collection.sort('CLOUD_COVER').first());
print('Least cloudy image: ', image);

// Limit the collection to the 10 most recent images.
var recent = collection.sort('system:time_start', false).limit(10);
print('Recent images: ', recent);

Python setup

See the Python Environment page for information on the Python API and using geemap for interactive development.

import ee
import geemap.core as geemap

Colab (Python)

# Load a Landsat 8 ImageCollection for a single path-row.
collection = (
    ee.ImageCollection('LANDSAT/LC08/C02/T1_TOA')
    .filter(ee.Filter.eq('WRS_PATH', 44))
    .filter(ee.Filter.eq('WRS_ROW', 34))
    .filterDate('2014-03-01', '2014-08-01')
)
display('Collection:', collection)

# Get the number of images.
count = collection.size()
display('Count:', count)

# Get the date range of images in the collection.
range = collection.reduceColumns(ee.Reducer.minMax(), ['system:time_start'])
display('Date range:', ee.Date(range.get('min')), ee.Date(range.get('max')))

# Get statistics for a property of the images in the collection.
sun_stats = collection.aggregate_stats('SUN_ELEVATION')
display('Sun elevation statistics:', sun_stats)

# Sort by a cloud cover property, get the least cloudy image.
image = ee.Image(collection.sort('CLOUD_COVER').first())
display('Least cloudy image:', image)

# Limit the collection to the 10 most recent images.
recent = collection.sort('system:time_start', False).limit(10)
display('Recent images:', recent)