Georainbolt has amassed an impressive 2 million followers on TikTok for sharing his impressive geolocating videos. Along with locating places where family photos were taken, he has also shared videos locating where famous vines were filmed, where a random captcha image was taken, and the road featured in that one viral jumpscare video from about 10 years ago. (If you don’t know the one, be glad that your friends never tormented you with it.) Georainbolt makes it look shockingly easy to find any location on the planet, which has made some followers joke that you “wouldn’t want him stalking you” or that he’s using his “powers for good”.
And while Georainbolt might be the best at this geolocating, don’t let that discourage you from joining in on the activity, if there's a photograph that you’d like to track down the location of. In fact, crimes have even been solved this way. In the 2019 Netflix documentary, Don't F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer, a group of strangers on the internet band together to help track down Luka Magnotta, a young man who posted a video online of himself murdering a kitten. The amateur internet sleuths created a Facebook group where they would share information that they could deduce from Luka’s photos and videos online, such as what the traffic lights looked like and where you could purchase a vacuum seen in one of his videos, to track down his whereabouts.
It might take hours to locate where your own family photos were taken, if you’re not as skilled at the process as Georainbolt, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn. The Observers posted a guide to geolocating photos and videos online last fall, so we’ve consulted it to share some of the best tips and tricks with you all. First of all, you’re going to want to be familiar with Google Maps and Google Street View. You’re also going to want to have impressive attention to detail skills. Take note of everything you can see in the image, including telephone poles, trees, traffic signs, traffic lights, stores, people, etc. These can all be clues as to where an image or video was taken.
“[Google Maps] also contains another hidden treasure,” The Observers team writes. “The blue dots indicate geolocated photos taken by everyday people and uploaded. By clicking on these images, you can also see a 360-degree view of the area. This also can help you verify where an image was taken or, indeed, if the area has changed since the image was taken.”
Nowadays, even social media sites like Twitter and Instagram can be helpful in locating where a photo or video was taken. On Instagram, users are encouraged to tag locations, which can provide an even better view of what a place looks like than Google Maps, at times, and on Twitter, you can view tweets that were sent from a specific place. “For example— if you want to look through tweets posted within a 50-kilometer radius of Tunis, then just type ‘Tunis’ into Google Maps, then right-click on the map. From there, you can select ‘More information about this site’, which will allow you to get a geolocation code for Tunis. Then, on TweetDeck, use the keywords ‘geocode:36.807515,10.179146,50km’ in the left-hand column,” the team at The Observers explains.
While you might find it a bit unsettling how easy it is to locate photos, videos and people nowadays, just remember that Georainbolt is out there using his skills to make peoples’ lives even better, so you can too. Let us know in the comments if you have any plans to start geo-locating on your own, and if you do, what place are you looking to find? Then, if you’re interested in checking out another Bored Panda article featuring maps that might teach you something new about our world, look no further than right here!
