mutant.kiwi Imagery Explorer

A point-and-click explorer for 621,728 New Zealand aerial and near-infrared imagery sheets spanning 1940 to 2025. Stream any sheet as a Cloud-Optimised GeoTIFF directly into QGIS — no downloads required.

Getting Started

Open the panel — Click mutant.kiwi Imagery Explorer in the toolbar or press Ctrl+Shift+I.

Click the map — Click anywhere to find all imagery at that location. Results appear grouped by region, sorted newest first.

Load a sheet — Double-click any result to stream it into QGIS, or click Open on Map.

Results Panel

Results are grouped by region (e.g. "Auckland Aerial Imagery") with the most recent surveys first. Pink items are near-infrared imagery, automatically rendered as CIR false-colour.

Interaction	Action
Single-click a result	Highlight the tile footprint on the map
Double-click a result	Load the COG into QGIS
Open on Map button	Load the COG into QGIS
Copy URL button	Copy the S3 COG URL to clipboard

Compass Navigator

Right-click any loaded COG sheet on the map → Add more sheets to open the compass.

A compass rose appears with 8 direction buttons (N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW):

Active buttons (blue) — a same-series sheet exists in that direction
Greyed buttons — no neighbour available, or already loaded
Click a direction to load the adjacent sheet — compass closes automatically
Press Esc to dismiss without loading

The compass strictly matches the same imagery series — resolution, date and coverage are always consistent.

Near-Infrared Imagery

NIR sheets are auto-detected and rendered as Colour Infrared (CIR): Red ← NIR (healthy veg = bright red), Green ← Red, Blue ← Green.

LINZ Basemaps

Via mutant.kiwi Imagery Explorer menu → Add Basemap: NZ Topographic, NZ Topo Lite, NZ Topo Raster, NZ Topo Raster (Gridless), NZ Current Imagery, Scanned Aerial Imagery (post 1989), Scanned Aerial Imagery (pre 1990).

Settings

Setting	Default	Description
Max results per click	50	Cap on sheets returned per query
Zoom to extent on load	On	Zoom to COG extent after loading
Show tile footprint	On	Highlight boundary on single-click
Group by series	On	Group tiles by series in the layer panel

Keyboard Shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+Shift+I	Toggle Imagery Explorer panel
Esc	Close compass or help panel

Troubleshooting

No results after clicking

Check your internet connection. See View → Log Messages → mutant.kiwi Imagery Explorer for details.

COG fails to load

Check View → Log Messages → General for GDAL errors. Ensure your network allows HTTPS to nz-imagery.s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com.

Compass directions all greyed out

No adjacent same-series sheets exist, or all neighbours are already loaded on the map.

Data & Attribution

© Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand — CC BY 4.0
Source: nz-imagery AWS Open Data | Web viewer: imagery.mutant.kiwi