ShadowFinder: Find possible locations of shadows around the world | Hacker News Reader

ShadowFinder: Find possible locations of shadows around the world

github.com

70 pointsconsumer45111 comments

So if you remove ALL the metadata from a photo, including the time it was taken, how likely is it that the location can be guessed? Asking for a friend.

(Assume the sky isn't visible.)

Extremely dependent on the photo, but generally more doable that most people assume. Geowizard on youtube has a series where he guesses the location of arbitrary photos sent to him by subscribers, and he has quite a high success rate. Even without being a wizard at geography, an amateur can make a solid attempt just by being intelligent about using the clues available.

https://geospy.ai/ is disturbingly accurate. They sell an API that even returns a street address.

GPT-4o is also terrifyingly good if prompted to think investigatively. I've uploaded a photo of a friend's generic backyard with no text, signs, people, sky, or anything obvious, and it nailed their specific neighborhood. I've even sent it nothing more than a photo of my bathroom (with product labels blacked out) and it still identified sufficient clues to guess a locality within 200 miles of my actual location.

A regular Sherlock Holmes with superhuman levels of world knowledge.

Did you remove the metadata before sending it? The bathroom story is far too impressive if you did, and could help identify kidnapping victims' locations

Yes. I even resized and reencoded after running the images through an EXIF stripper and verifying there was only pixel data left.

Ubiquitous world knowledge is a powerful police tool.

Did you ask what clues it used to determine the location? Would be interesting to know

Just ran a few things through geospy. Including one of the inside of a plant room with some very generic aircon units. It got the right city based on the brick work.

Interestingly, my experience with it has been the opposite. While it's quite good at understanding what's in the picture it only has gotten my country right a few times and even then it just gives the capital, which I'm quite far away from.

Demo video from Rainbolt, the guy who can geo guess anything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQIjDPFgdJA

That vid also demonstrated that the tool alone isn’t enough. You need a rudimentary grasp of geoguesser to know where in the marked circle to even start looking

Yes, the title should be "greatly accelerate the process of finding a location..."

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