whereisthisplace.online
Find where a photo was taken—and see why.
The obvious interface for photo geolocation is “upload → pin.” I chose a slower-looking product shape: metadata check → clue scan → ranked candidates → confidence → map verification.
The reason is trust. When the photo is an ordinary street or a compressed social screenshot, an exact pin can look impressive while being impossible to audit. whereisthisplace.online makes the free output the evidence layer: candidates, confidence, reasoning and a map. The paid layer is proof — exact pin and Street View comparison — but only when the image supports that level of precision.
I kept the free tier genuinely useful: no account needed, up to two analyses per day and five per week. The free result includes the top candidates, reasoning and a map lead. The paid step is only offered when the system has enough evidence to merit a precise answer.
The hardest inputs turned out to be the most common ones. A compressed Instagram screenshot has no EXIF, a cropped UI border and a rescaled image — so finding a location from an Instagram screenshot needs a different prompt shape: https://whereisthisplace.online/tools/instagram-locati0n-finder
Same for old family pictures, where you are working with no GPS data at all and every clue has to come from the frame: https://whereisthisplace.online/tools/find-locati0n-no-exif
I also added browser-only EXIF viewing and metadata removal, because finding a place and protecting your own location data are two sides of the same problem. You can inspect EXIF data locally in the browser without the file leaving your machine: https://whereisthisplace.online/tools/exif-viewer
I wrote up the photo geolocation methodology — the five stages, how the confidence labels are defined, and which cases should return low evidence instead of a guess: https://whereisthisplace.online/methodology
Tech stack: Next.js on Cloudflare Workers, PostgreSQL via Neon, Leaflet for maps, Stripe for payments. Solo-built in Singapore.
I’d be interested in feedback from other builders on the boundary between a useful free answer and a paid verification artifact:
1 Comment
Interesting choice to make precision something the system has to earn rather than always output.
Especially when the paid step only appears once the evidence supports it.
Curious what you're seeing from users so far.