A Newbie Geolocation Practice
July 18, 2020
Recently, this youtube video is keeping popping out from my recommendation feeds and I do spend some time watching it while I was studying. With this gorgeous landscape and its attractive study vibes in this video, the whereabouts of this place plague me for a while. So on a rainy night, I decided to do some research and to figure out where is this exact location of this wonderful place.
Social Media
Social media contribute a huge part of OSINT investigation, people tend to expose way too much information about him/herself. In that sense, social media is the first step to gather useful information.
The first information in my hand is this YouTuber’s presumably username Estudiar Derecho which translated to English is Studying Law, meaning she is currently a Law school student I guess? From her youtube about page, she linked her Instagram account and Pinterest account into it. So it’s a huge boost, I don’t need to google it out and as we all know these two were image sharing services, hence it may contain many juicy photos on it.
Based on intro from this Youtuber’s Instagram page, the rough geolocation is [📍 Córdoba, Argentina 🇦🇷]. Well, this isn’t’ enough apparently. We need to know the exact location right? So let’s go through those image feeds, specifically targeting the one with iconic buildings or like sunrise/sunset.
And here we go, beatiful sunrise images:
Another one:
With the help of those two sunrise images, we can conclude this building faces towards south.
And iconic buildings:
- A rectangle-shaped building with a white body.
- A black dome-like structure, presumably Warehouse or something.
- A building with a unique ladder-shaped rooftop.
- A huge area lawn right in front of this building.
The information we now have still cannot pinpoint the exact location, it can only be used to confer the orientation and future verification.
Facebook tends to have photos with much higher resolution, so hop over to her facebook page.
So here come the key images ~ ~
The first one:
As we can see, there is another ladder-shaped building, an intersection, and the most important part is a store named FRIOMAX. though a little bit blurry, we can still roughly recognize each letter.
The more clear one:
And again:
- Previous building 3 unique ladder-shaped rooftop.
- Building with a unique ladder-shaped rooftop and a store called
FRIOMAX. - Intersection
Geolocation
Now, google search FRIOMAX, Córdoba:
Then, open Google Earth, type the address above: Esquiú 594 X5004AEM, X5004 AEL, Córdoba, Argentina.
After the fancy zooming animation, we will have this view:
The intersection is pretty much matched.
Based on previous sunrise information, let’s rotate this view a little bit to fit the exact orientation from the perspective of where those previous photos were taken.
That’s it!
- Number 1: rectangle shaped building with white cover, check.
- Number 2: first building with ladder-shaped rooftop, check.
- Number 3: dome-like warehouse with a black colored rooftop, check.
- Number 4: second building with ladder-shaped rooftop, check.
- Number 5: a lawn block with huge area, check.
- Number 6: the intersection where the store resides, check.
In the end, all of this is based on open-source information. Out of curiosity for whereabouts of this wonderful landscape. Córdoba is a beautiful city! Hope one day I’ll get to visit this place.
Written by nnfewl, a noob. Follow me on Twitter