YouTuber Shows How to Find the Location of Any Photo in Two Minutes
A photo location expert has made a tutorial explaining how to find the exact location of a photo with just a few clues.
Trevor Rainbolt, who is a Google Maps expert and professional GeoGuessr video game player, took rapper Jack Harlow’s recent album cover for Jackman and found the exact location of where it was shot.
“You’re probably looking at this thinking how the heck are we going to find the location for this in five minutes,” he says.
However, Rainbolt goes on to explain his methodology. Rappers are known to represent their hometown so Rainbolt figured the photo was shot in Harlow’s home city of Louisville, Kentucky.
Clues
Backing up his theory is a license plate in the background of the album cover that looks vaguely like it is a Kentucky plate.
Harlow’s album cover was shot in a back alley where there are trash cans. Rainbolt points out that trash cans are useful for determining a location because they are region specific. A quick Google search for “Louisville trash cans” confirms that the trash cans in Harlow’s photos do indeed belong to the city.
Also in the photo is a shed with the number “1948” on it, signaling the street number for that property. Rainbolt explains that this piece of information can be used to feed a website called Overpass Turbo that uses OpenStreetMap data.
Overpass Turbo requires knowledge of coding but for those who can’t code, Rainbolt shows that ChatGPT can be used to generate a code to be fed into Overpass Turbo that will show the user all of the 1948 addresses in Louisville, Kentucky.
Rainbolt then gets the coordinates of the 1948 addresses in Louisville and runs them through Google Maps, which has Street View, to check if any of them match with the album cover. Although this part can be labor-intensive, Rainbolt says to look out for clues like the shape of the building on Google Maps and since the photo was shot in an alley he knew the location was likely to be behind the addresses instead of the main street.
Rainbolt managed to find the location of Hawlow’s album cover in no time at all.
“This is a pretty simple process and it’s how I would do it. This is for educational use only, if you guys are wondering how the sausage is made that’s kind of the process on some of these,” says Rainbolt.
“A lot of the times you don’t get the pleasure of having an address where you can just go through like that. A lot of times it’s a lot more research.”
Last year, PetaPixel reported on how a Russian missile crew was geolocated from just a single photo.
