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Comment by ed25519FUUU | Hacker News Reader

> "I have a very weird hobby, which is I love taking a look at photos and figuring out where they're taken."

Sometimes you have the right person in the right place at the right time. I'm also really interested in learning more about how this person pinpointed the hiker.

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If you want to approximate it, play GeoGuessr with the self-imposed restrictions of no movement, no rotations. Obvs GeoGuessr primarily has road shots, but if you spend enough time at it, you will find it is a skill that can be improved.

There's also a subreddit for this sort of thing — r/whereisthis.

For non-players, the "self-imposed restrictions" are actively enforced by the UI if you choose to request them. The most restrictive category is "no moving, panning, or zooming", abbreviated "NMPZ", in which you must guess your location from a single still Street View image.

If you search for "NMPZ" on YouTube, you'll see that some people have become very very good at this (!).

You can also sit on the couch while your spouse watches House Hunter’s International and try to find the apartments as they go.

Ben explains his methods here:

https://twitter.com/ai6yrham/status/1382371967618097157

https://twitter.com/ai6yrham/status/1382781121407029253

It's a surprisingly fun "game"! I've been on a quest to geotag all my older photos, from digital cameras without GPS. It's a great combination of a trip down memory lane – what do I remember about where I was when I took some photo on a trip, or back in college? – plus playing the role of a satellite spy-photo analyst.

You could imagine that skill would be prized at somewhere like the CIA

If I were CIA I'd just ask for (or I already have) all street view imagery from Google and run an image search.

Even if it's Yandex (Russian) Street View, the CIA should have the resources to download them..

Lol... I don't think they'd have all cliff face imagery :)

It's not about the ability to identify an address, it's about the talent that makes you much better at that than most people are.

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