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 …
Why are all these people parking their cars at a swimming pool in the middle of lockdown? This was the question Lars Wienand posted for yesterday’s Quiztime challenge. Here’s the photo: To solve this quiz we need to do two things. First we need to know where this is, and secondly we need to know …
Ever since I started blogging about image geolocation I’ve tried to write about methods and techniques that make solving these kind of puzzles more structured and systematic. In my professional career I was (until recently) a criminal investigator so it was helpful for me to transfer habits and methodologies from traditional investigation to the subject …
Extract, Research, Verify: Quiztime 6th October 2020. Read More »
This article was written jointly with Matthias Wilson (@MWOSINT). It is also published on his own site here. IP addresses feature prominently in digital investigations, but how useful are they for geolocation? The truth is that while IP addresses have many investigative uses, they can be quite unreliable as a precise geolocation method. The limitations …