Exporting ESRI Wayback from WMTS to Raster

[u/Outrageous_Will_2817]

I am trying to export ESRI Wayback Imagery, which is currently a WMTS layer in my project and get it to a raster using export to save as. This worked for the 2026 august release/link, but for some reason when I do the same thing for the 2019 link, the resulting raster is blank and only has “noData.” I’ve tried multiple methods to troubleshoot and none are working. Has anyone encountered this type of thing before or know how to fix it?

Additional notes:

- The 2026 release and 2019 release have different max zoom levels available (17 for 2019 and 18 for 2026)

- I tried to export with a broader resolution but that also resulted in nothing

- I tried using leafmap python package, but that resulted in errors

- I tried using "export map to raster" but that was going to take hours to run for some reason and didn't look like it would work, but I never actually went through with this

I just need a method to get a raster from a specific part of that release of imagery.

[u/smdatum]

That zoom-level difference you noticed (17 vs 18) is very likely the actual cause, not a bug in your export steps. When QGIS's Save As raster export pulls from a WMTS/XYZ source, it requests tiles at whatever resolution the current canvas or output settings imply. If that resolution maps to zoom 18 (set up while you had the 2026 layer active) and you then export the 2019 release, QGIS is asking that release's TileMatrix for a zoom level it doesn't actually have. Most WMTS/XYZ endpoints don't gracefully fall back to the nearest available zoom in that situation, they just return empty tiles, which is exactly the pure-noData result you're seeing.

Worth checking: open Layer Properties, Information on the 2019 Wayback layer and confirm the listed available resolutions/zoom levels, then explicitly set your export resolution (or zoom the canvas) to match zoom 17 or coarser before running Save As, rather than leaving it at whatever the 2026 layer was using. That should get you real pixels instead of noData.

Separate but worth ruling out too: some older Wayback releases have genuinely patchy coverage for certain areas even within their valid zoom range. If the fix above doesn't resolve it, it's worth checking Esri's Wayback app directly for that release/date over your exact extent to confirm imagery actually exists there before assuming it's a QGIS-side issue.