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Finding locations with just a photo… (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by randomcruft@lemmy.sdf.org to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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Hi folks, hope all are well today!

Is there a Lemmy community (or dare I say Reddit sub) that talks about finding locations from photos without meta/EXIF data?

I know there are groups that do this sort of thing for “fun”, so I thought I would ask here first… before doing random internet searches.

I have photo of a person in a location but my “tracking skills” are terrible. Best I can do is determine the country the photo was taken in.

My intent is to keep myself safe, I am not doing anything nefarious!! Just throwing that out there folks 🙂

Appreciate any and all feedback/responses. Have a great day all!

UPDATE 12/20/2024: I was able to very the info I needed without using any photos. However, I do appreciate all the responses. Maybe this post will help others.

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[–] evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

As others mentioned, the geoguessr community has a lot of resources, but it's largely focused on locations on streets (cause the game is built on Google streetview). Things like streetsigns can really help narrow down a country.

As someone else mentioned, Open Source Intelligence (OSInt) is what you want to be looking for. Investigative journalism sites like Bellingcat actually show their work, which is really cool. For example, they wanted to find the location of a massacre in ethiopia, so they used an app called Peak Visor to match the topology of the mountains in the background to triangulate the position. There's also tools to use the angle of shadows and things like that. They have tutorials on their site.

[–] randomcruft@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 day ago

Very interesting indeed! Thank you for this information… I’ll do a little research on this.