I have some old screenshots of interesting locations from Google Earth circa 2006-2012 that I've never been able to track down. I wonder if something like this would be capable of geolocating them somehow -- like reverse image search for landscapes.
I have some old screenshots of interesting locations from Google Earth circa 2006-2012 that I've never been able to track down. I wonder if something like this would be capable of geolocating them somehow -- like reverse image search for landscapes.
There's a whole community (with world tournaments [1]) around finding places from pictures: geoguessers. The top people are absolutely incredibly [2]. There are also AI trained for this purpose. Although, the perspective they use is usually from street level.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3sVtwexp0o
[2] https://www.youtube.com/@georainbolt
A few people recommended Geoguessr (and people like Rainbolt are definitely amazing), but yeah I reckon they're hyperspecialized on reading clues in actual street view imagery, not natural satellite footage like this.
Rainbolt often finds locations for people who have old photos of friends/family who have passed away etc., so the skills definitely seem to extend past just street view.
Out of interest: have you already tried using GPT 5 (reasoning / thinking) for that? I've had quite some success in the past using them to track down such places.
Yeah, that and Gemini 2.5. They actually were able to help identify a handful based on context clues, or at least narrow it down enough that I could find it myself. But there were three I couldn't crack -- even a forum dedicated to solving GE puzzles came up empty:
https://googleearthcommunity.proboards.com/thread/10731/ulti...
Hey Jordan,
I gave it a try and look for the locations, specially the 3rd one that does indeed look like it could be in Chile.
For the 2nd picture I found an island in the French Polynesia that has very similar colors and characteristics, might be its around that area, 8°56'10.8"S 139°34'41.2"W (-8.936304553977038, -139.57811272908305)
For the 3rd picture I found many locations that look like your picture but really couldn't find one. The first one is around Mexico, though it probably isn't 27°32'39.0"N 114°45'00.5"W (27.544166, -114.750130). And the second one are islands close to Morocco 28°01'54.4"N 17°16'22.9"W (28.03198233652239, -17.27306308433365) though the angle is not the same... As a bonus for the 3rd picture, I did find in the Andes mountain something that looks like your picture: 33°38'11.7"S 70°07'01.4"W (-33.636446, -70.116968). So maybe you should also look around mountains.
At least from what I've seen in Chile the coast is usually very rocky and the water is usually lot of waves, and in the picture it looks really smooth. (Though I don't know how zoomed out the picture is)
Maybe Geoguessr players would be good at identifying them as well?
First photo could be Namibia? 29°40'04"S 18°11'12"E
Hmm, plausible... though I'll have to go back in time and kick myself if it turns out I captioned it with the wrong continent!
Gemini says:
"This looks almost certainly like a satellite view of a region in Western Australia, such as the Pilbara or the Hamersley Range. The dark areas are likely ancient, iron-rich rock formations (ironstone), and the surrounding soil is iconic of what's known as Australia's "Red Centre."