Walkthrough — Hacktoria: Geolocation 06

(Click here to watch and listen to the video version of this blog entry)

Note: The Hacktoria website no longer has geolocation challenges therefore all the links have been removed. This blog entry is for legacy purposes only. Free feel to give it a go by attempting to geolocate the image before reading the walkthrough.

As I was having so much fun doing Hacktoria’s geolocation challenges, I decided to just keep solving them and writing walkthroughs explaining my process. I have skipped the walkthroughs for a few previous geolocation challenges as they were too easy to require an explanation so here we are at number 6.

Geolocation – 06

Question: What is the name of this stadium?

We can start the usual way by right clicking the image, saving it to our machine and then zooming it all over the place to get useful information.
From the wording of the question we already know it is a stadium and from the flag at the top right of the image we can tell it will be located in the United States of America. We can spot some sort of banner or illustration on the wall, just behind the big tree on the left. If we zoom in and crop it, it becomes quite clear that we are looking at an image of a person holding a baseball bat.

So now we know that we are looking for a baseball stadium somewhere in the United States of America. I ran a reverse search on the cropped image but got no leads.
I also noticed what looks like it could be the team logo in the building.

I will admit I spent way too long looking through lists of baseball team logos and got no useful information. Due to the colours of the flag in the picture I can’t even tell whether it is the baseball team flag or just some creative design of the USA flag. I abandoned that search and turned my attention somewhere else as I feel it was not going anywhere.

Another interesting detail we can see in the challenge photo is the statue, or better, the bust. Unfortunately it is facing the other way but that won’t stop us from giving it a go. We can still do a reverse search with it.

We get no useful results in either Google or Bing but look what we can spot in Yandex.

There is a clear similarity between the back of the bust from the geolocation challenge photo and the image we just found on Yandex. It is very likely the same one. Now we just need to find out where in the USA it is located.

The link to the image claimed it is located in Indiana. Unfortunately when we click the link for “THE 10 BEST Parks & Nature Attractions in Indiana” the image is missing. The link leads to a huge list of nature parks in that state but no signs of the bust we are looking for.

At this point we could go for either searching for the name “Robert Allen ‘Bob’ Griese”, as seen in the image above, to figure out who he played for or keep trying to find the location of the bust using the image. I decided to go for the photo but either choice would eventually lead to the correct answer.

Now that we had the front image of Robert Allen Griese’s bust we can do a reverse image to see if it was found in any other websites with more information.
TinEye gave me a few results, as seen below, so I went with it.

It looked like another TripAdvisor link but this time it leads to activities in Evansville. When opening the link we can immediately find something useful as on number 2 there was a stadium. Could it be the one we are looking for?

Time to open Google Maps and check out the area around it.
We can immediately notice the yellow lines on the ground, highlighted in red in the image on the left, similar to the ones seen in the geolocation challenge photo, on the right.

Very promising! Let’s check it out using Google Street View.
Although we cannot enter the parking area whilst navigating with street view, we can still place ourselves on the main road and zoom in. This will enable us to view the stadium from the correct angle in order to compare the images.

Below on the left we have the geolocation 06 challenge image and on the right a printscreen I took of the view of the area using google street view.
We can confirm this is the right location by looking at both images side by side and finding all the landmarks.
Starting from the bottom left we can identify the green container underneath the big pillar on both pictures. Next to it are the stadium lights, and underneath the tree also visible in both images. We can even recognise the fabric that at the beginning I wasn’t sure if it was a creative USA flag or the team flag (doesn’t look like the USA flag any more though). Finally we can also see on the right of both images the entrance of the stadium with the white top.

So there you have it, the name of the baseball stadium is on the google maps image.

What is the name of this stadium?
– Bosse Field

Using google maps one more time we can also try to pinpoint the exact location where the photographer of the geolocation 06 image was when they took the picture by using visual cues: 37.9933, -87.56318.

I hope that was informative and helpful in case you were stuck.
If you reached the same conclusion using a different method feel free to share it as I would be very happy to learn new techniques and/or tools.

Thank you for reading!

~ Sofia.