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How To Conduct Geolocation (Patreon)

Published:
2021-10-29 10:11:32
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

In an exclusive video for our Patreon subscribers, Giancarlo Fiorella explains the concept of geolocation and how it can be put to use by online investigators.

You can find some of the many Bellingcat investigations that have utilised geolocation here. Explainer pieces that detail how to perfect geolocation techniques can be found here. A more detailed breakdown of how we located the beach image detailed in this video can also be found here.

Files

Previews only

How To Conduct Geolocation

In a video exclusively for our Patreon subscribers, Giancarlo Fiorella explains how to conduct geolocation in investigations.

Comments

James Cronin

Hi, thanks for good introduction to geolocation, but you skipped a few steps and pretty much everything you promised to show, the catch was ," How can you geolocate an image like this?" Im really curious! But suddenly you went from, all of south east asia, India, Australia and East Africa to Madagascar, how? scanning this area in 2 weeks? And then even Madagascar is not that small but I can see how it is possible to scan the beach areas in madagascar, how could he narrow it down to three spots? So rally looking forward to hear about how it was done as promised. :)

Aakash Gupta

This is interesting. I wonder if this activity can be automated, so that the results can be achieved faster? - Maybe create a database of images taken from Google Maps (street view) and create a similarity search index. Which can then be mapped to any new image that is uploaded

Nick

I’ve seen a few places where Google street view is outdated for about 6 years, and when I came there, the surroundings were totally different. I bet the newer photos from those places are much harder to geolocate.

Bellingcat
>>70793817

Hi Akash, People are trying to do this. We know researchers who've experimented with different automation processes. One involved an AI that was trained to spot certain types of buildings, like stadiums or bridges,

Bellingcat
>>70919320

Definitely! Part of the process might involve finding reference images from places other than Google Maps. For example, other mapping services like Yandex Maps, Bing Maps, or Mapillary might have more recent images from the location that you're searching. You could also look for walking tours or travel videos on YouTube from the place that you're searching, A lot of geolocation comes down to the question, "Where else could I find pictures from this place?"