# Geolocate from pixels Human Guide

## What This Is For
Geolocate and chronolocate a photo or video from visual evidence alone — plate and phone number formats, road markings, utility poles, bollards, signage typefaces, architecture and. It gives the agent a clearer input/output frame for search and SEO workflows: what context to ask for, what decisions to make, and what usable artifact to return.

Use this as a human-readable version of the Geolocate from pixels agent skill. It is meant for marketers, operators, founders, and other non-coders who want the workflow without reading agent-specific implementation instructions.

## When To Use This
- Use this when you need a repeatable process for geolocate from pixels.
- Use this when the task needs judgment, examples, constraints, or a clear output format rather than a one-off prompt.
- Use this when you want to hand an AI assistant enough context to produce a usable marketing artifact.

## When Not To Use This
- Do not use this when you only need a quick factual answer.
- Do not use this when the work depends on private data you cannot share with the assistant.
- Do not use this as a replacement for legal, compliance, financial, or medical review.

## What You Need Before Starting
- The goal or business outcome you want.
- The audience, customer segment, or market context.
- Any source material the assistant should respect, such as notes, briefs, examples, URLs, or brand guidance.
- Constraints such as tone, length, channel, deadline, region, or approval requirements.
- A clear definition of what a good final answer should look like.

## Step-By-Step Workflow
1. State the job clearly: "Use the Geolocate from pixels guide to help me with..."
2. Add context: audience, goal, offer, channel, source material, and constraints.
3. Ask the assistant to identify missing inputs before producing the final output.
4. Have the assistant follow the skill-specific guidance below.
5. Review the result against the final checklist and ask for revisions where needed.

## Skill-Specific Guidance
- **Inventory.** Write a numbered list of every clue in the frame before you
- **Fix the country.** Combine your tier-1 and tier-2 clues until they agree. If
- **Read the text properly.** Transcribe, then translate, then search the
- **Narrow to a locality.** Named businesses go into a mapping search restricted
- **Query the map for the geometry, not the place.** When you have no names but
- **Confirm in imagery.** Match the candidate against satellite/aerial *and*
- **Chronolocate.** Sun position for time of day and date band, season from
- **Score it.** Three independent features aligning, or stop.
- **Confirmation bias is the failure mode of this discipline.** You will find a
- **Imagery is dated, and you are comparing across time.** A missing building may
- **Ornamental and introduced vegetation lies constantly.** Eucalyptus grows on
- **Global brands and franchised signage tell you almost nothing** except where a

## Decision Points And Nuance
The original skill emphasizes: Rank your clues before you search, Method, Imagery sources and where each one wins, Where this goes wrong, Confidence grading, Worked example, Pivots, Legal and ethical notes, Supporting file: reference/chronolocation.md, Step 1 — Establish hemisphere and rough time from shadow behaviour.

Use these questions to steer the work:
- What is the intended audience or buyer?
- What source material must be preserved?
- What should the assistant optimize for: clarity, persuasion, accuracy, speed, creativity, or conversion?
- What examples represent the desired quality bar?
- What should the assistant avoid?

## Common Mistakes
- constraint is never the image; it is your patience and your reference knowledge.
- | 5 | Vegetation and biome | Latitude band, climate, hemisphere. Careful: ornamental planting is global. |
- arrangement of a fence. Do not match on things that change — parked cars,
- | Mapillary | Crowdsourced street-level. Covers roads, tracks and countries Street View cars never drove. Often the only street-level imagery for rural areas and much of Africa, South Asia and the Balkans. |
- sub-metre certainty you do not have.
- single horizontal crossarm and stubby brown insulators, a warning sign in a Latin
- of these are judgement calls you must make explicitly and record. See
- point either way depending on the date. Do not assume hemisphere from shadow

## Copy-And-Paste Prompt
```text
Use the Geolocate from pixels human guide.

My goal:
[Describe the business outcome]

Audience:
[Describe who this is for]

Context and source material:
[Paste notes, examples, links, or existing copy]

Constraints:
[Tone, length, channel, timeline, must-include items, must-avoid items]

Before producing the final output, ask me for any missing information that would materially improve the result.
```

## Final Checklist
- [ ] The output matches the original goal.
- [ ] The audience and context are reflected in the answer.
- [ ] Important constraints and source material were preserved.
- [ ] The assistant made the relevant decisions explicit.
- [ ] The final artifact is ready to use, review, or hand to the next person.

## Source
This guide was generated from the useosint/skills skill entry for `geolocate-from-pixels`.

## Source Skill Notes
These notes preserve the nuance from the original skill. Use them as supporting reference when the workflow above feels too generic.

# Geolocate from pixels

Every photograph taken outdoors contains enough information to place it. The
constraint is never the image; it is your patience and your reference knowledge.

The beginner mistake is searching before inventorying. People see a mountain,
type "mountain with two peaks" into a search box, and get nothing. The method is
the opposite: extract every clue first, rank them by how much of the planet each
one eliminates, and only then start searching — because the clue that pins the
country is usually not the one your eye went to.

## Rank your clues before you search

Work down this list. Each row eliminates far more of the world than the one below
it, so a single row-one clue is worth twenty row-six clues.

| Tier | Clue | What it buys you |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Readable proper nouns — business names, street names, municipal logos, school names | Often an instant pin. A business name plus a country is a map query, not an investigation. |
| 1 | Phone numbers on signage and vehicles | Country and frequently city, from prefix and digit-grouping convention. |
| 1 | Language *and script*, then orthography | Script narrows to a family; specific diacritics, letter forms and spelling conventions narrow to one country and sometimes one region. |
| 2 | Licence plate format — shape, colour, band, character layout | Country, often issuing region. Visible from a long way off, survives compression. |
| 2 | Driving side | Splits the world roughly a third to two thirds. Read it from parked-car steering wheels, not just from traffic. |
| 2 | Road markings — centre-line colour, dash rhythm, edge lines | Yellow versus white centre lines alone cuts most of the world. |
| 3 | Utility pole construction and insulator style | Regionally conservative and rarely changed. One of the most reliable tells in the frame. |
| 3 | Bollards, guardrails, kerb painting, chevron markers | Nationally standardised, nationally distinctive. |
| 3 | Traffic signal mounting, lens arrangement, backboards | Overhead versus pole-side, horizontal versus vertical, extra lenses — all national conventions. |
| 4 | Signage typeface and road-sign standard | Which sign standard a country adopted, and its specific alphabet. |
| 4 | Satellite dish elevation and azimuth | Constrains latitude, and the orbital slot indicates which service region. |
| 5 | Architecture, roofing material, window and balcony conventions, rooftop tanks and heaters | Region and climate band. |
| 5 | Vegetation and biome | Latitude band, climate, hemisphere. Careful: ornamental planting is global. |
| 6 | Terrain and horizon profile | Only useful once you have a candidate region — then it is decisive. |

Every variation and what it implies:
[reference/regional-indicators.md](reference/regional-indicators.md).

## Method

1. **Inventory.** Write a numbered list of every clue in the frame before you
   search anything. Include the negatives — no snow, no palms, no overhead wires
   — because negatives eliminate regions just as well. Zoom in on every sign,
   every vehicle, every pole. Run the preprocessing recipes in
   `find-the-original-image` to read underexposed or small detail.
2. **Fix the country.** Combine your tier-1 and tier-2 clues until they agree. If
   two contradict — Cyrillic signage with right-hand-drive cars — that
   contradiction is a finding: an imported-vehicle market, a border region, or a
   composited image.
3. **Read the text properly.** Transcribe, then translate, then search the
   transcription verbatim in the local language. Searching a translation loses
   you the match. If the script is unfamiliar, get the script identified before
   you attempt letters — Georgian, Armenian, Amharic, Khmer, Thai, Lao and
   Sinhala are all frequently misidentified as each other's neighbours by people
   guessing.
4. **Narrow to a locality.** Named businesses go into a mapping search restricted
   to the country. Chains are useful in reverse: a chain that only operates in
   three provinces eliminates the rest of the country.
5. **Query the map for the geometry, not the place.** When you have no names but
   you do have structure — a water tower next to a rail crossing next to a
   football pitch — query OpenStreetMap features directly with Overpass rather
   than panning around. This is the step most people skip and the one that most
   often works.

```
[out:json][timeout:90];
area["ISO3166-1"="RO"]->.a;
nwr["man_made"="water_tower"](area.a)->.t;
foreach.t -> .w (
  nwr(around.w:400)["leisure"="pitch"]["sport"="soccer"];
  out center;
);
```

6. **Confirm in imagery.** Match the candidate against satellite/aerial *and*
   street-level sources. Compare invariants: building footprint shape, roof
   colour, the count and spacing of windows, kerb line, tree positions, the exact
   arrangement of a fence. Do not match on things that change — parked cars,
   awnings, signage, foliage density.
7. **Chronolocate.** Sun position for time of day and date band, season from
   vegetation, weather archives for corroboration. Procedure in
   [reference/chronolocation.md](reference/chronolocation.md).