In addition to one-click access to satellite OSINT , there are more and more tools for finding out the exact location where a photo or video was taken from. Any detail - a road sign, a signboard, power lines, the relief of mountains in the background, and even the length of the shadow from a pole can be a clue for researchers. We bring to your attention a selection of geolocation tools from leading OSINT researchers.
A platform that estimates image location using deep learning/AI.
Here you can look at other people’s photos and manually enter their location, learn the system, or you can upload your photo and ask the system to “guess” the location.
The heat map shows the areas that had the most impact on the decision.
I uploaded my photo from the historical district of Istanbul - the system could not determine.
Contains data on over 1,000,000 mountains around the world. Draws the contours of mountains, often used in investigations to identify locations by the outline of the terrain in the background.
Conflict Map
A non-profit platform, still in beta, that provides hundreds of datasets on the state of the planet’s resources and inhabitants. Sponsored by the World Resources Institute and other organizations.
NOx emission
map Power plant map
A free and open source GIS containing many add-ons and plugins, such as creating 3D landscapes based on lidar data.
textbook
Twitter location-based search
Enter the query into the search string: geocode:[coordinates],[radius-km], for example: geocode:36.222285,43.998233,2km (only works with “km”, 500 meters = 0.5km). Be careful, it’s very easy to spoof geolocation on Twitter.
Database ~4.4. million buildings in Canada (GIS format) from Statistics Canada.
The geographic database GeoNames contains information on all countries and has about 11 million names of locations.
Tips and life hacks from the best players in GeoGuessr (an international quest game for determining the geolocation from a photo).
Contains information on the types of roads (surface, posts, markings, bumpers), road signs (on both sides), license plates, road signs, power lines, garbage cans.
The map contains power lines, telecommunications, solar, oil, gas, water infrastructure around the world.
The main purpose of OpenSeaMap is to collect and add to OpenStreetMap information that is useful to sailors and yachtsmen, and to provide it in a convenient way. This includes information about lighthouses, buoys and other navigational signs, repair shops, shops, restaurants, etc.
A nautical chart of borders, special zones, shipping lanes with an overlay of sea communication lines.
Interactive maps of the South China Sea with oil and gas fields, fishing areas, air defense zones and administrative, claimed, disputed zones, submarine cables.
Web-based data mining tool for OpenStreetMap.
Allows you to query the Google Maps API for two specific locations at an exact distance from each other within a given radius. Useful for geolocation of photos and videos. This is a script, no user friendly interface.
The idea came to life during the geolocation of a picture taken in an unknown place. The developer thought it would be very useful to ask Google Maps to find “all restaurants in the area with a maximum distance of 30 meters from the newsstand”. So he wrote a simple Python script that allows you to query the Google Maps API for two specific places at the exact distance from each other in a given area.
converting coordinates
Convert geographic coordinates between different notation styles.
World map with 3D buildings and their shadows at different times of the day.
An interactive 3D map that allows you to view the location of the shadows of buildings around the world at any time of the day and any day of the year.
If you want to know what kind of shading you will have at a certain time and in a certain place, you can simply look at its location on the shadow map. Enter a date and time of day, and the shadow map will show you the shadows that nearby buildings will cast at that very moment.
