ZeroTrace OSINT
Visual & Geolocation
Image metadata and a suite of geolocation tools, clue matching, map plotting, OSM and Commons search, and terrain-horizon matching.
The Visual & Geolocation discipline combines image-level investigation (EXIF, GPS, perceptual hashing) with place-level investigation (clue matching, map plotting, feature search, horizon matching). It is the area of OSINT most commonly asked about and the area where investigators most often hit a "what tool do I even use for this" wall.
The toolkit's design principle here: prefer local computation, prefer free public sources, never use face recognition. Every tool runs on your machine; the few that hit external services name those services on the result.
What's in this section
| Tool | What it does | Best when |
|---|---|---|
| Image metadata | EXIF, GPS with map link, IPTC / XMP, embedded thumbnail, camera/lens serials, perceptual hash | You have a photo. Start here. |
| Geo clue matcher | Select observed clues (script, driving side, plates, outlets, signage, biome) and rank countries by match | "Roughly where was this photo taken?" image-geolocation challenges |
| Geo map view | Paste lat/lon CSV or JSON and render pins on a dark-themed MapLibre map | Plotting candidate coordinates |
| Geo meta reference | Searchable catalogue of country-specific visual cues (utility poles, road paint, bollards, signage) | Looking up what a clue means, fully local |
| Commons geo-search | Search Wikimedia Commons photos by coordinate, place name, or bbox | Verifying a candidate location with other people's photos |
| OSM feature finder | Find OSM places that match an anchor tag plus nearby-feature constraints (Overpass-driven) | "Find a place with feature X near features Y and Z" |
| Horizon matcher | Extract a photo's skyline and rank viewpoints in a bbox by terrain-horizon match | Narrowing a viewpoint from a distinctive skyline |
Image metadata is filed under the Hash & File group inside the app, and the geolocation tools (geo map view, geo meta reference, Commons geo-search, OSM feature finder, horizon matcher) live under the OSINT Specials group. They are grouped together here because they share the visual-and-place investigation workflow.
What this section deliberately does not include. No face recognition, no biometric matching, no search-by-face. The legal and ethical risks of those capabilities outweigh the OSINT value. The closest thing the toolkit offers is the image tool's perceptual hash, matching identical or near-identical images, not identical people.
A typical image-geolocation workflow
For an unknown photo where you need to figure out where it was taken:
- Image metadata, start with the cheap wins. EXIF GPS, if present, is the answer. EXIF camera details narrow the device family.
- Geo clue matcher, select the visual clues you can read off the photo (script, signage style, driving side, plates) and let the matcher rank countries.
- Geo meta reference, look up what an unfamiliar clue means.
- OSM feature finder / Commons geo-search, once you have a candidate area, search for matching places or other people's photos of the same spot.
- Horizon matcher, if the photo has a distinctive skyline, rank viewpoints inside a bounding box by terrain match.
Privacy and consent
Image investigation can rapidly cross into territory where the subject of a photo has not consented to being investigated. The toolkit does not transmit any image you load; every photo you load stays on your machine. But the outputs of image investigation can be sensitive. Apply judgment about what to publish, share, or store, particularly where private individuals are concerned.
What the toolkit does not store
Photos you load into the application are processed in memory and on local disk. They are not transmitted to ZeroTrace and are not logged centrally. The only network calls the visual tools make are the map-tile and search-API fetches named on each result.