My son enjoys playing GeoGuessr, which is “a geography game, in which you are dropped somewhere in the world in a street view panorama and your mission is to find clues and guess your location on the world map”.

Some people are incredibly good at it, and can identify places within seconds. They use clues such as shadows, streetlights, and even the colour of soil or sand.

Bellingcat, an investigative journalism group specialising in “fact-checking and open-source intelligence” has released a tool to help figure out the location of images or video for more serious purposes. This is particularly important in a world of misinformation.

Geolocation is often a time-consuming task.

Researchers often spend hours poring over photos, scouring satellite images and sifting through street view.

But what if there was another way to quickly narrow down your search area?

Bellingcat’s new Shadow Finder Tool, developed with our Discord community, helps you quickly narrow down where an image was taken, by reducing your search area from the entire globe to just a handful of countries and locations.

Source: Bellingcat

Tool: Shadow Finder