Read the world like a street-view pro — clues per country, then pin it.
A field guide to placing any street view: what the road paint, the plates, the poles,
the script and the soil each give away, country by country — and a game that deals you clues and
scores how close you pin them, GeoGuessr-style.
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Click the map to guess.
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The model's five best guesses land here — 1 is its favourite.
Pin a photo
Any photo with geography in it. The model works the same clue ladder as the
field guide — driving side, paint, plates, script, poles, soil — and pins its five best guesses.
Ten photos per hour per visitor; the image is analysed and not stored.
Order of operations — every round, same ladder
1 · Driving side. Halves the world in one glance. Left: UK & Ireland, Malta, Cyprus, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Indian subcontinent, Australia & NZ, and East/Southern Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Botswana, South Africa, Lesotho, Eswatini). Note the traps: the Philippines and Cambodia drive right despite the neighbourhood; Rwanda drives right despite East Africa.
2 · Sun and shadows. Sun due south at midday → northern hemisphere; due north → southern. Short shadows → near the equator or summer; long → high latitude or winter. Combined with driving side this often leaves two or three candidate countries.
3 · Road paint. Yellow centre lines: the Americas, Norway, South Korea, Japan (on no-passing), the Philippines. White centre: most of Europe. South Africa flips it — white centre, yellow edge lines; Ireland uses yellow dashed edges.
4 · Plates (even blurred). Both plates yellow: Netherlands, Luxembourg, Colombia, Israel. Yellow rear only: UK. White with red characters: Belgium. Blue EU strip: the EU. Blue-striped white Mercosur plates: Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay. North America: colourful and state-varied.
5 · Script. The fastest continent-killer — see the alphabet table below.
6 · Poles, bollards, kerbs. The street furniture rarely lies — see the country cards.
7 · Camera and car. Generation, blur, height, and what is mounted on the Google car itself — the most era-fragile clue, but decisive when present.
Alphabet keys
ø Denmark/Norway · å DK/NO/SE · ä ö Sweden/Finland (Finnish doubles vowels and consonants: kk, aa) · õ Estonia or Portugal · ā ē ī ū Latvia · ė ų Lithuania.
ł Poland · ř ů Czechia · ľ ĺ ô Slovakia · ő ű Hungary (double acutes exist nowhere else) · ș ț (comma accents) Romania · ğ ş ı Turkey · ç France/Portugal/Turkey/Albania · ë everywhere in Albanian.
Cyrillic:і ї є only Ukraine · ъ mid-word everywhere → Bulgaria · ә ғ қ ң Kazakhstan · ө ү Kyrgyzstan/Mongolia · ѓ ќ ѕ North Macedonia · Serbia mixes Cyrillic and Latin on the same street.
Asia: Thai has little circles at letter heads; Lao is its rounder, airier cousin; Khmer (Cambodia) is spiky with stacked feet; Burmese is all circles. Devanagari's horizontal bar → North India/Nepal; round Sinhala → Sri Lanka; Tamil → Tamil Nadu/Sri Lanka; Bengali's triangular hooks → Bangladesh/West Bengal. Hangul blocks → Korea; kana mixed with kanji → Japan; traditional characters → Taiwan/Hong Kong; simplified → mainland China (little coverage).
Camera & car tells (era-fragile — Google re-drives)
Kenya: a black snorkel pokes into the right of the frame.
Ghana: black tape on the front of the car, often a follow-car behind.
Nigeria: a police escort truck shadows the car.
Mongolia: off-road tracks braided across the steppe, dusty low-gen camera.
Low-gen blur + halo sky: old coverage — think Albania, Montenegro, parts of Africa and Latin America.
Snow poles with red-white downward arrows over the road edge: Hokkaidō, Japan.
Regional tie-breakers
Nordics: warning signs yellow with red border in Sweden/Finland/Iceland, white in Norway; Norway paints the centre line yellow; Iceland is treeless with yellow roadside poles.
Iberia: Portugal's cobbled pavements (calçada), azulejo tiles and (pre-2020) yellow right-edge plate strip vs Spain's Osborne bulls, olive rows and paired road-sign posts.
Alps: green motorway signs → Italy or Switzerland; blue motorways → Germany/Austria/France. Austrian town signs carry a blue border; German town signs are yellow.
Balkans: Albania's concrete bunker domes; Serbia's mixed scripts; Croatia's white karst and red roofs on the coast; Slovenia looks Austrian.
Latin America: Chile's Atacama vs Peru's coastal fog desert; Colombia's yellow plates and green Andes; Argentina's dead-flat pampa and Mercosur plates; Brazil speaks Portuguese — ão on any sign settles it.
Southeast Asia: left + Thai script → Thailand; right + Khmer → Cambodia; scooters in armies + ệ ễ diacritics → Vietnam; jeepneys and English/Tagalog, driving right → Philippines; Jalan → Malaysia/Indonesia/Brunei — Malaysia's roads are richer, Indonesia's kerbs often red-white.
East Africa: red murram roads everywhere; matatus + snorkel → Kenya; boda bodas and "Stage" signs → Uganda; immaculate paving, moto-taxi helmets and a thousand hills → Rwanda (driving right!).
Meta drifts: Google re-drives countries, plates and generations change. Curated 2026-09; the era-fragile clues say so. For the instant version — hand the picture to the model that read this page.