🧭 geo-sleuth

An agent skill that finds where a photo was taken — and shows its work.

No text. No plates. No landmarks. One bridge, one mountain. Located to within 2 m.

Quick start

npx skills add Oldcircle/geo-sleuth

Pick your agents when prompted. Then hand your agent a photo and say:

find where this photo was taken

That is the whole interface. The agent reads SKILL.md, runs the scripts, and comes back with the camera position, the direction it was facing and a satellite evidence image. Prefer to copy the folder yourself? See Installation.

Why geo-sleuth

• One photo, one sentence. Give your agent a photo and say find where this photo was taken. You get back the camera position, the direction it was facing, and a satellite evidence image.
• It works when there is nothing to read. No sign, no plate, no landmark: OpenStreetMap geometry, elevation data, satellite tiles and street view carry the search on their own.
• Geometry instead of guesswork. Pier spacing becomes a distance ruler, shadows become a bearing, a ridge line becomes a fingerprint that elevation data can be matched against.
• Every claim points at a file. A conclusion has to name the command that ran in the session and the file it produced. Population and fame are not evidence.
• Scripts rank, the model judges. Twenty single-purpose scripts search, score and sort; the model only picks among the top few.
• One skill, every agent. A standard Agent Skill — SKILL.md plus plain Python scripts — so the same folder runs in Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, OpenCode and GitHub Copilot.
• Answers carry an error radius. Coordinates ± radius, the camera heading, an evidence image and a graded confidence.

The case: one photo, nothing to read

A phone photo with the EXIF stripped: a white oven at the edge of a harvested rice paddy, a long viaduct in the distance, a steep mountain on the right. Not a single character in the frame. One message to an agent with this skill installed, and it came back with the camera position and the direction the camera was facing.

photo → 27,335 → 171 → 14,372 → 22 → 3 → 1 → ±2 m

Installation

geo-sleuth is a standard Agent Skill: one folder holding SKILL.md, scripts/, references/ and data/. Install it with the skills CLI, or copy the folder yourself.

All six agents, user-wide, one command:

npx skills add Oldcircle/geo-sleuth -g -a claude-code -a codex -a cursor -a gemini-cli -a opencode -a github-copilot -y

By hand:

git clone https://github.com/Oldcircle/geo-sleuth
mkdir -p ~/.agents/skills ~/.claude/skills
cp -r geo-sleuth/skills/geo-sleuth ~/.agents/skills/              # Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, GitHub Copilot
ln -s ~/.agents/skills/geo-sleuth ~/.claude/skills/geo-sleuth     # Claude Code

~/.agents/skills/ is read by Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, OpenCode and GitHub Copilot, so one copy there covers all five. Each agent's own folders, from its docs:

Any other agent that reads SKILL.md and runs shell commands works the same way: put the folder where it looks for skills.

How it works

The work is split into three layers. Scripts decide, scripts perceive and rank, the model only judges among the top few.

flowchart LR
  A["photo"] --> B["intake.py<br/>EXIF · OCR · reverse image search"]
  B --> C["board.py<br/>candidate board: clues, likelihood ratios, ranking, next step"]
  C --> D{"which branch?"}
  D --> E["sun.py · terrain.py · osm.py · pose.py<br/>shadows, skylines, OSM corridors, camera pose"]
  D --> F["sat_scan.py · match.py · gsv.py · baidu_pano.py<br/>CLIP-ranked satellite tiles, DINOv2+SIFT street view"]
  E --> G["board.py check · report"]
  F --> G
  G --> H["evidence.py<br/>coordinates ± radius · evidence image · graded confidence"]

| Layer | Wh