Show HN: Weather2Geo – Geolocate screenshots from weather widgets | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Weather2Geo – Geolocate screenshots from weather widgets

github.com

54 pointsElliott-Diy9 comments

Hi HN,

I built an OSINT tool called Weather2Geo that helps locate where a screenshot was taken based on the weather widget data visible (e.g. temp, condition, and local time in the taskbar). People often post these without realizing how specific those values can be in combination.

It works by comparing the given weather condition, temperature, and time against current data from thousands of cities. It’s timezone-aware, supports fuzzy matching, and groups results geographically to reduce noise.

It’s most effective on recent screenshots, ideally taken within the last hour—since weather and daylight conditions change quickly.

The tool helps pinpoint likely locations when screenshots lack EXIF data or other traditional OSINT clues.

It’s open source here: https://github.com/elliott-diy/Weather2Geo

Would love feedback, bug reports, or to hear if you think this has other use cases.

- Elliott

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I think you can parse the date and time format as well to shrink your problem space.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_date_formats_by_coun...

That's a great idea. I'll see how I can add this in today!

Do you plan to scrape the data and maintain a historical database so old screenshots can be used too?

Would be really cool but I imagine it could be difficult to get past rate limits.

That’s actually an end goal! I’m thinking of setting up a system to crowdsource this: if people opt in, the tool could cache the weather data it pulls and share it to help build a distributed historical dataset.

There are meteorological services with open data access: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/cdo-web/, https://english.knmidata.nl/open-dat, https://climatedataportal.metoffice.gov.uk/

Mapping that would be quite a bit of work, I imagine.

Yeah, mapping it would definitely be a project. I looked into using open data from those sources, but ran into issues where the values didn’t match what MSN reports (which is what the Windows weather widget uses). Even small differences in temperature or how conditions are worded ("partly sunny" vs. "mostly sunny") can throw off the match. I’m planning to try using open data for historical screenshots eventually, but I expect it’ll reduce accuracy greatly.

Using a time series database would be great here.

I would assume you need to add your time and location at the time of the screenshot also so that you can correct the remote displayed time to Microsoft Weather time?

Yep! The tool currently only works with screenshots taken within the past hour, since that's the only weather data I have access to right now. It also relies on having a consistent reference point for time. When you run the script, it uses your current timezone to help align the time shown in the screenshot with Microsoft Weather's data.

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