OSINT Newsletter # 30 — Geolocation Challenge
Hello Everyone! This entry will detail my solution to a geolocation challenge from Jake Crep’s OSINT Newsletter. The challenge asks for the city and the exact coordinates of this image. Seems pretty manageable.
I began by analysing what I could from the image to help me narrow down a possible geographic area. The stone street pattern and the architecture gave me the impression that I was probably looking at a Slavic country in Central Europe. To further assist, I ran this image through a couple of reverse image search engines, paying special attention to the green and white striped market stands. In this case, Yandex provided the most precise result, placing me smack dab in the middle of Pogačar Square in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Great, finding the geo-coordinates should be a breeze, right? It wasn’t as straightforward as I thought, but not too difficult either.
I used Street View to search the area in the screenshot above to find the site of the source image, but it turned out this was the wrong area. Another inspection of the source image highlighted features that would help me find the exact location, namely: a curved road, trees in front of a red-roofed building, a green building that is perpendicular to a cream-colored building, and a building with green facing on the street level in the vicinity of the same green and white striped market stands.
I fired up Google Earth to perform an aerial 3-D view of the area around Pogačar Square when I found this:
Three out of four of the previously highlighted features seem promising, I checked out the Street View of this area and cried tears of joy when I saw this:
Without a doubt, everything matched! The geo-coordinates of this place are 46.05156169006589, 14.505593209051767.
