Comment by hpincket | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hpincket | Hacker News Reader

I get a kick out of pinpointing the exact location of photos or paintings. A couple of communities exists for this:

* Geoguessr (I don't participate in this one much, street view is pretty limiting)

* The Dish's "View from My Window" archive. A now defunct blog series where readers would submit photos from their window. Very difficult. Users often pinpoint the exact window from which the photo was taken. http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/vfyw-contest/

* SkyScraperCity's Guess the City contest. A daily contest to guess the city. Also this is a precious internet 2.0 forum. https://www.skyscrapercity.com/

* North Korea enthusiasts pinpointing the exact location of Kim Jung Un in official DPRK photos.

* r/whereisthis helps Reddit users locate photos, also allows content just for fun.

* r/PictureGame a more open contest, not necessarily a geolocation task.

Hey there, I'm the founder of a small travel app (www.r3d.city) that is essentially a virtual geocaching/treasure hunt platform. We're just about to come out of beta, and one of the new features is seeded historical photos; e.g. heritage sites in the 1920s. We're putting a lot of work into geotagging these photos directly onto the capture location, you might find it interesting. The idea is that as you walk around some historical location, you can view images of that location from N years ago, from the exact point of view (or near enough) where that photo was taken.

What kind of tools do you generally use? I’m assuming a search engine to identify particular landmarks/stores/etc, and personal knowledge, but what else?

I heard of people looking at the position of stars (on night photos) and the sun to guess the latitude.

There was a story during the 2016 US election campaign where someone had a webcam pointed at a flag for some of the parties, and some folks managed to find the location by observing the stars and drove there and changed the flag, or something like that.

Edit: link to the story: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d7eddj/4chan-does-first-g...

My favourite if a little harsh description of 4chan is weaponised autism.

Literally in one case https://www.quora.com/How-did-4chan-get-the-coordinates-of-a...

There's a tomscott video on this during the most recent eclipse, how people determined his location. Its got some really interesting tidbits

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGqEBvlmFAQ

I'm surprised you didn't also mention geocaching

Geoguessr was a hit with my family. My wife and kids loved to play it.

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