Sunday Funday!

Happy Sunday (or not, if you’re heading back to work). Today I picked a short and easy Geolocate posted by rye on Bluesky:

Let’s dig in.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

Let’s talk tools. Everything I used to locate where this photo was taken is public facing and free because fo’ free is fo’ me. For this challenge, my loadout is simply ExifTool, Yandex, and Google.

So what about methodology? Super simple and I’ll break down this quick OSINT challenge step by step.

I like to start by really looking at the photo. There’s going to be some details in there that are going to help you out. In this case, there’s a big one but we’ll get to that in a minute. Like troubleshooting, we start big and isolate down. We can see here by the power outlets that this person is in the US or Canada so we’re able to eliminate several continents just from this information.

Since this is a social media post, what I’m about to show you is essentially an exercise in futility but we’re going to try it anyway. Meet ExifTool! As you can see, I’m a Mac user but this is a multi-platform tool you can use to extract the exif data from a picture. Most social media websites scrub the exif data from photos that are uploaded so if you’re sourcing your photos from social media, just know you’re not likely to get much, if anything.

As you can see here, I wasn’t paying attention the first time I tried to run it and I accidentally a space. Running the tool is actually easy.

exiftool /your/full/filepath/picture.jpg

If you're looking specifically for geo data:

exiftool -gps:all /your/full/filepath/picture.jpg

You can get even more granular than that but I’m not going to get into the weeds here.

As you can see, we get some exif data but nothing we can really use for the challenge. Time for the human brain to shine!

I rinsed it through a couple of reverse image searches, Yandex and Google. I didn’t get any results I could use but remember that detail I mentioned earlier?

This detail is the golden ticket. It do be like that sometimes. This unassuming, mostly obscured bit of text is the key to solving the whole thing.

So where was this picture taken?

If you’ve figured it out, let me know!

Good luck, have fun, be safe, and stay curious.

~Muninn🐦‍⬛