Terms of Service

1. Who we are and what this service does

Where Is This Place (whereisthisplace.org) is an AI photo geolocation service. You give it an image, a video frame, or a text description of a place, and it returns a best guess at where that scene is, together with map links and background information about the candidate location.

It does this by combining several signals: EXIF metadata embedded in the file when it is present, landmark recognition from Google Cloud Vision, a vision-language model running on Cloudflare Workers AI that reads legible text and recognises specific structures in the picture, and geocoding lookups against public map and encyclopedia data. When none of these is conclusive, the service declines to name a place rather than guessing. Our methodology page explains the pipeline and its measured limits in detail.

By using the site you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree with them, please do not use the service. These Terms were last updated on 13 September 2026.

2. The result is a hypothesis, not a fact

This is the most important clause in this document, so it is not buried at the bottom.

Every location we return is a probabilistic guess produced by a machine learning model, and it can be confidently wrong. The model performs best on well-known landmarks and distinctive urban scenes photographed in daylight. It performs poorly on generic interiors, plain landscapes, close-up subjects, night scenes, and heavily edited or AI-generated images. A high-looking confidence score is not proof.

Accordingly:

• Do not rely on a result as evidence. If the answer matters — journalism, legal proceedings, insurance, safety, academic work — you must independently verify it against primary sources such as satellite imagery, street-level imagery, official records, or a person who knows the place.
• We make no warranty of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose. The service is provided "as is" and "as available".
• We do not guarantee uptime. The service depends on third-party AI and mapping providers and may be interrupted, rate-limited, or changed without notice.

3. What you may upload

You may only submit files that you have the right to submit. By uploading, you confirm that:

• You own the image or video, or you have permission from the rights holder, or the file is public and your use of it is lawful in your jurisdiction.
• The file does not contain content that is illegal to possess or distribute — in particular, no child sexual abuse material, no content that infringes another party's copyright, and no material classified or restricted by law.
• The file does not contain malware or content designed to attack our systems or those of our providers.

4. What you may not do with the results

Geolocation is dual-use. It is the backbone of open-source fact-checking, and it is also a tool for stalking. The following uses are prohibited and will get your access terminated:

• Locating a private individual without their consent. Do not use this service to work out where someone lives, works, studies, or is currently staying, from photos they posted.
• Stalking, harassment, doxxing, or intimidation, or assisting anyone doing those things.
• Surveillance of a person or group on behalf of a government, employer, or private client where the subject has not consented.
• Circumventing safety systems — for example, re-identifying locations that a platform has deliberately obscured to protect a vulnerable person.
• Automated scraping or bulk querying outside of a written agreement with us, including any attempt to rebuild our result set as a competing dataset.
• Reselling the raw output as if it were verified location data.

If you are doing legitimate investigative or research work, the ethical line we ask you to hold is the one used by professional OSINT practitioners: verifying a public event or a public place is fine; publishing the precise location of a private person is not.

5. Accounts, credits, and payment

Some features are metered with credits. A free account receives a monthly credit allowance; paid plans, where offered, receive a larger allowance.

• You are responsible for the accuracy of your account details and for keeping your credentials secure. Tell us promptly at support@whereisthisplace.org if you believe your account has been accessed by someone else.
• Credits are a licence to use the service, not a stored-value instrument. They have no cash value, cannot be transferred, and expire at the end of their stated period.
• Where a paid plan is offered, prices are shown before checkout and charged through our payment processor. We do not receive or store your card details.
• Refunds. If a paid feature does not work as described, email us within 14 days of the charge and we will refund it. We do not refund credits that were spent on results you simply disagree with, because an inaccurate guess is an expected outcome of the service as described in Section 2.
• We may change plans and pricing. Changes apply to future billing periods, never retroactively.

6. Your content and our content

Your files stay yours. Uploading does not transfer ownership. You grant us only the narrow licence needed to run the service: to transmit, store temporarily, and process your file so that we can return a result to you. That licence ends when the file is deleted. We do not use your uploads to train models, and we do not publish or sell them. Retention periods and third-party processors are set out in our Privacy Policy.

Our material stays ours. The site, its interface, the written guides on this blog, and the arrangement of the service are protected by copyright. You may quote from our articles with attribution and a link. You may not republish them wholesale, or use them to train a model, without written permission.

Map data, place descriptions, and imagery returned in results may originate from third parties such as mapping providers and Wikipedia, and remain subject to their own licences.

7. Advertising

This site is funded in part by advertising. Ads are labelled and are served by third-party ad networks, which use cookies and similar technologies. What they collect and how to opt out is described in our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy. We do not let advertisers influence which locations the model returns or what our guides say about competing tools.

8. Copyright complaints

If you believe material on this site infringes your copyright, email support@whereisthisplace.org with: identification of the work, the URL of the material you are complaining about, your contact details, a statement that you believe the use is unauthorised, and a statement that your notice is accurate. We will review and, where the complaint is valid, remove the material.

9. Suspension and termination

We may suspend or terminate access without notice if you breach Section 3 or Section 4, if your use threatens the stability of the service, or if we are required to by law. You may stop using the service and delete your account at any time from your account settings.

10. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages, or for any loss arising from a decision you made on the basis of a location result. Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or USD 100 if you paid us nothing.

Nothing in these Terms excludes liability for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.

11. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. The revision date at the top of this page always reflects the current version. Material changes will be announced on the site before they take effect. Continuing to use the service after that point means you accept the new version.

12. Contact

Questions about these Terms, or about anything on this site, go to support@whereisthisplace.org or through our contact form. We aim to reply within two business days.