AI photo geolocation, built by a small independent team
Where Is This Place answers one question: where was this photo taken? Upload an image — or paste a description — and we combine EXIF metadata, landmark recognition, and text found in the picture into a single best guess, with a map and background on the place. It is free to try, no account needed, and we are open about the cases where it fails.
We started Where Is This Place because working out where a photo was taken used to be slow and manual — scrubbing through reverse image searches, comparing landmarks by hand, or giving up. Our mission is to turn that research task into a single upload, and to be honest about the answer's confidence rather than dressing up a guess as a fact.
Three checks run on every image, and each one answers only when it has something to go on. First, if the file still carries GPS coordinates, that measurement is used directly. Next, a landmark recogniser looks for a specific, well-photographed structure it can match. If neither is conclusive, a vision-language model reads any legible text — a station name, a shop sign, a festival poster — and names the place, the region and the country it points to; that name is then looked up on a map, checked against the country the model stated, and discarded if it could just as easily be a namesake somewhere else. When none of the three is sure, we say so instead of guessing. Our How It Works page explains each step and publishes what we measured.
AI geolocation has sharp edges and we would rather you know them. Generic interiors, plain beaches and forests, night shots, close-ups, heavily edited images, and AI-generated pictures all produce weak or confidently wrong answers. Landmark coverage is also uneven by region — Europe, North America, and East Asia are far better represented than most of Africa, Central Asia, and rural South America. Treat every result as a hypothesis to check, never as evidence.
Travellers rediscovering where an inspiring photo was taken. Journalists and OSINT researchers verifying where an image or video originated. Teachers and students exploring world geography hands-on. Photographers and archivists geotagging old libraries. What we will not help with is locating a private person from photos they posted — that use is prohibited by our Terms.
Our guides are written by people from methods they have used, and edited before publication. We carry no affiliate links and take no paid placements, so our tool comparisons name competitors and say plainly when a rival approach beats ours. We also prune: guides that stop being accurate or useful get rewritten or removed rather than left to pad the site.
Where Is This Place is built and run by a small independent team, not a large company. There is no support call centre — messages to support@whereisthisplace.org reach the people who build the thing, and we aim to reply within two business days. Reports of wrong results are genuinely welcome; they are how the accuracy notes on our How It Works page get written.
Uploaded images are used only for the identification you asked for, are never used to train models, and are deleted after processing. We never sell your photos. Our EXIF viewer runs entirely in your browser and does not upload the file at all. Full detail, including how advertising and cookies work on this site, is in our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy.