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
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.
Just create a screenshot of the pic and upload that.
Edit the location metadata to be obviously false (Alaska coordinates for a tropical beach photo) then see what it says?
Use google maps, and take a screenshot.
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.