Viral ChatGPT trend is doing 'reverse location search' from photos

Posted by jnord 4/18/2025

Viral ChatGPT trend is doing 'reverse location search' from photos(techcrunch.com)

108 points | 55 commentspage 2

notsylver 4/18/2025|

I've been digitising family photos using this. I scanned the photo itself and the text on it, then passed that to an LLM for OCR and used tools to get the caption verbatim, the location mentioned and the date in a standard format. That was going to be the end of it, but the OpenAI docs https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/function-calling?lan... suggest letting the model guess coordinates instead of just grabbing names, so I did both and it was impressive. My favourite was taking a picture looking out to sea from a pier and pinpointing the exact pier.

imposterr 4/18/2025|

Hmm, not sure I understand how you made use of OpenAI to guess the location oh a photo. Could you expand on that a bit? Thanks!

notsylver 4/19/2025||

I showed the model a picture and any text written on that picture and asked it to guess a latitude/longitude using the tool use API for structured outputs. That was in addition to having it transcribe the hand written text and extracting location names, which was my original goal until I saw how good it was at guessing exact coordinates. It would guess within ~200km on average, even on pictures with no information written on them.

huydotnet 4/18/2025||

I gave it this picture https://i.imgur.com/HyfVxiD.jpeg

At first, it's unsure, but also mention that there are a lot of riverside cafes in Southeast Asia that have this view. Then I said it was in Vietnam, and it was immediately concluded that this was taken at the Han River in Da Nang city, which was correct.

I can see that there is some actual analysis skill here. I'm not 100% convinced, but I'm still impressed.

sumedh 4/18/2025|

I took a screenshot of your image and this prompt "play the game geoguesser and guess where this image was taken"

Putting those pieces together, the most likely spot is one of the cafés on the east bank just north of Dragon Bridge. A popular candidate with a very similar railing/table setup is Bridgespan Café (also called Bridge Cafe) at ≈ 16.0645 N, 108.2292 E.

Location guess: A second‑floor riverside café on Trần Hưng Đạo street, east bank of the Hàn River, Đà Nẵng, Vietnam (looking southwest toward Dragon Bridge).

Approx. coordinates: 16.064 °N, 108.229 °E

Confidence level: 70 %

The bridge‑light pattern and cruise‑boat LEDs strongly suggest Đà Nẵng, but several cafés share almost identical views, so the exact establishment is harder to pin down.

Oarch 4/18/2025||

I tried just now. It got one image exactly and proposed reasonably good but wrong guesses for the other two.

Makes me appreciate the insane level of skill that humans on GeoGuessr style subreddits have.

Gigachad 4/18/2025|

There are geoguesser specific AIs which are able to outperform the top players consistently. It’s just surprising a generalised AI can do it.

paulgb 4/18/2025||

I’ve found it surprisingly good, but has anyone verified that it’s not just using EXIF geolocation data embedded in the photo? I haven’t bothered to strip it.

Edit: just saw defrost’s link to the earlier threads, and one comment did just that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43724063

jillesvangurp 4/18/2025||

I've given it a screenshot and it got close enough. So, it's not looking at exif data.

I've been playing a bit with just giving it random things from Google's streetview.

It figured out a landmark in Dresden pretty easily. But then I gave it a generic view of some street in Nuremberg and it took a long time. It extracted lots of information from the screenshot. Including the logo of a travel agency and some very pixelated house numbers. Amusingly I actually triggered some AB testing thing where it was using two models in parallel side by side.

I just let it do its thing and it looked like it got stuck in some loop. Eventually both models produced an answer. They both correctly identified the city but then both models came up with two wrong streets. The travel agency has offices across Germany and probably multiple in Nuremberg as well. There was no street name readable and no house numbers. It based this off just the name of the travel agency and the fact it was next to some hairdresser.

It seems to be using python scripts to zoom in on different bits of the image and search engines to query clues it finds. It also looks at architecture and other aspects to deduce things about country, regions, etc. Overall, I'm pretty impressed with how far it got.

manmal 4/18/2025|||

Just create a screenshot of the pic and upload that.

tomjen3 4/18/2025|||

I used it to place some old vacation photos.

These were taken without EXIF for GPS (because the cameras did not have GPS), and it was still very good. With anything turisty it got them immediately, and with my photo of a house on the Muese river it got it nearly perfect. When I added a few more photos I was able to nail it down to a couple hundred meters.

I did it all with 4o (the old model), the only issue is that if it starts to search the internet it will then lie to you that its not able to read pictures.

curiousObject 4/18/2025|||

Edit the location metadata to be obviously false (Alaska coordinates for a tropical beach photo) then see what it says?

TrackerFF 4/18/2025||

Use google maps, and take a screenshot.

anshumankmr 4/18/2025||

Its pretty good I had used 4o many months back with a picture of me deccades back in nalanda, and mind you not the iconic huge wall that most people associate with it, but another corner of the place and it knew where I was back then.

aprilthird2021 4/18/2025||

Not to rain on anyone's parade. This does seem fun, but I have been doing this with Google Lens or Gemini on my phone for a while now and it's usually pretty good already?

I mean a while like Google Lens has been able to do this for a long time...

Rastonbury 4/18/2025|

Yeah I wanted to post this, reverse image search can already do this easily. Sometimes when one of my friends posts a pic in a foreign land, I try to geoguess, it once told me the name of the hotel the view was taken from

simianwords 4/18/2025||

Working backwards -- it seems like a good idea to use geoguessr in the training set for SFT or sorts. I would imagine it would generalise well to other aspects.

piinbinary 4/18/2025||

With a sample size of 1, Gemini 2.5 Pro (Experimental) did a great job of this (and was considerably faster than O3)

krunck 4/18/2025|

People taking pictures with you in them without your permission, whether intentional or not, are invading your privacy.

knowitnone 4/18/2025|

you're saying you've NEVER taken a picture of anyone in the background without their permission?

throwaway85747 4/19/2025||

It's not inconceivable, given that smartphones became widespread about a decade ago. Somehow, we endured for hundreds of thousand of years without recording every single moment of our lives to feed into the social media data mining machine.