Sentinel-2 is the workhorse of free satellite imagery: 10-metre resolution, a revisit time of about five days, and thirteen spectral bands that support vegetation, water and land-cover analysis. The Copernicus Browser, run by the European Space Agency, is the official place to search and download it, and it needs no software installation.

Open the Copernicus Browser and use the search panel on the left. Draw a rectangle over your area of interest or enter coordinates, then set the date range. A useful habit is to search a two-week window rather than a single day, because cloud cover means the best scene is rarely the most recent one. Set the cloud cover filter to less than 20 percent to cut the list down to usable scenes.

The results appear as a list with thumbnails. Click a scene to preview it, and use the visualisation options to switch between natural colour, false colour infrared and individual indices such as NDVI. The preview is computed in the browser, so you can check vegetation or water condition before downloading anything, which saves time and disk space.

To download, you need a free Copernicus account. Sign up once, log in, and the download button becomes available on each scene. You can download the full product, which is a large zip file with all thirteen bands, or select individual bands if you only need a few. The files arrive as JPEG2000 rasters that open directly in QGIS.

Keep two limits in mind. First, free Sentinel-2 tops out at 10-metre resolution, so you can see fields and buildings as shapes, not details, and you cannot task the satellite: if nothing captured your site cloud-free recently, there is nothing to download. Second, high-resolution scenes can be huge, so download only the bands you need and work on a cropped area. For most vegetation, water and land-cover work, though, the Copernicus Browser is the fastest free route from a question to a map.