We have two different levels of access to Discover: general and licensed. General access is available to anyone and includes all our base maps and our publicly-available imagery (including the NAIP imagery). These services are only subject to our standard data license and disclaimer.

Our high-resolution imagery is provided by third parties and we are subject to their licensing requirements. Only entities associated with the state as defined in the license details may access these layers.

When you register for either general or licensed access, you will receive a set of links for the services. These links contain a "quad-word" that is unique to your organization. This allows us to analyze usage trends and disable licensed links that are compromised.

You are welcome to share your links within your organization-there's no need for individual users to register separately. However, do not share your links outside of your organization.

Licensed links may not be used in publicly-available applications or services without being locked down to the application's domain. Please contact us if you need to get a set of locked-down links. We will disable any "wide-open" licensed links that are being used in publicly-available applications.

While WMS and WMTS both return raster data that your client renders as a map layer, there are some key differences that make WMTS the better choice. Almost all modern clients support WMTS; generally, you should only use WMS if your software does not support WMTS.

WMS renders each request on the server according to the spatial extent requested by the client, using the server's resources to render a single, custom image for each request. While this results in a custom render for every zoom level, each pan and zoom queries a new request and a new render. In addition, to keep the server from being overwhelmed, WMS requests are often limited to a maximum number of pixels, which can cause problems when exporting or printing at large sizes or resolutions.

In contrast, WMTS serves a pre-rendered set of tiles that cover the requested extent. This results in much faster performance and unlimited export and print capabilities. However, these tiles are only pre-rendered at the common zoom scales , opens in a new tab , so the client must interpolate between these levels to render the map at custom scales, resulting in interpolation artifacts.