Some images are easier to geolocate than others. If an image is easy to geolocate it is generally because at least one of the following three conditions apply: Sometimes none of these conditions apply. When this is the case geolocation becomes much harder and a more methodological structure is needed. Here’s a walkthrough of such …
This week’s huge protests in Israel drew huge crowds to the streets – but how many people took part? Crowd sizes are often used as evidence to show how widely supported a particular cause is, so being able to determine how many people took part in a demonstration is an important skill for those working …
In last week’s Wednesday Quiz Tilman Wagner posted this photo and asked us several questions about it: 1) Who posted it and where? 2) What was the occasion? 3) Did Tilman participate, and if so, how? So where to start? We need to know the location before we can answer any of Tilman’s questions. There …
Quiztime: How To Clean Pictures For Better Search Results Read More »
If you’ve been interested in geolocation for any length of time, you’ll already be familiar with some of the most common tools that researchers make use of: Google Maps & Street View, Google Earth, reverse image search tools, Suncalc, and so on. There are many lesser-known tools that are also useful and can help to …
In this video Technisette and I joined David Bombal to demonstrate some different geolocation techniques. We covered quite a few topics including: EXIF Data Using terrain features to find locations with Google Earth Removing unwanted parts of an image to do better reverse image searches Cropping and reverse searching images with Bing and Google Lens …
Investigators are often faced with an overwhelming amount of data. In these situations finding an exact person, time, or place among all the noise can be very difficult. This problem is not limited to geo- or chronolocation challenges like those published by Quiztime either. Fortunately this is not a new problem and there are tried …
The Process of Elimination – Quiztime Jan 14th 2022 Read More »
Sometimes the way to solve a geolocation challenge is obvious. Other times less so. The Quiztime challenge that Fiete Stegers set on 8th October was certainly in the latter category and was probably the hardest Quiztime I’ve attempted so far. This is quite a lengthy write-up, so click to skip ahead to sections of interest. …
Geolocating images can be difficult. Sometimes the way to identify a location is not immediately obvious, but you can start with what you do know and then close the gaps to find out things that you don’t know and gradually get closer to your objective. For example you might be fairly sure about the country …
In the last post we looked at the basic building blocks of the Open Street Map (OSM) database. Objects in the database are made up of single nodes, ways (which are a series of single nodes joined together), and relations (which are more complex structures where ways and nodes are combined). Tags are used to …
The Open Street Map database contains detailed information about almost every square metre of the surface of the planet. Land use, building types, rivers, park benches, pubs, streets and millions of other data points are all mapped out and documented in detail. You might be familiar with the browser-based Open Street Map (OSM) website. Superficially …