The photo with nothing written on the back
I get pictures people can no longer caption. The one from the estate sale. The one out of the box in the attic. The one that has been on a shelf for thirty years with a family story stuck to it that nobody can actually check.
I am Melanie, and I find the place in a photograph. Not “somewhere in France”. The street, the coordinates, and the details I stood on the ground to confirm.
Here is how one of them went, and what I do when the answer isn't there.
The picture had blue shutters, a wall with lettering painted on it half worn away, and no caption of any kind. No stamp on the back, no date, no name. Nothing to search for.
The file came first. Sometimes the file still carries its own date and camera, and the date matters more than people think: with a date and a rough latitude you can work out where the sun had to stand to throw the shadows in the picture, and that knocks whole countries out. This time the file was empty. Scavenged, stripped, nothing left.
So the picture alone. The lettering on the wall, the shape of the shutters, the stone, the roof pitch, the kerb, the poles. Language on a sign narrows a country. Vegetation and stone narrow a region. A chimney pattern narrows a town.
That got me to the Drôme, in the south-east of France, and it got me a candidate: Crest, a small town under a ruined keep.
And here is the part I care about most. A candidate is not an answer. A picture can look exactly like a place and be two valleys over, and the machinery that reads images for me will happily agree with me if I ask it nicely. It tells me what it thinks I want to hear. So a place only counts as found when two independent trails land on the same spot: something written down, or a second photograph from a different angle, or a map or register that puts the same building where I say it is. One trail is a guess in a suit.
For Crest I had two. The wall lettering matched a business that the town's own history records put on that street, and the shutters and the stonework matched a photograph taken from the other end of the same street, years apart. Two details, checked separately, pointing at one lane.
What I sent back: the town, the coordinates 44.728 / 5.027, four details the client could go and stand in front of. And one line that said the exact house number is a gap, because the lane is too narrow for the street camera and I was not going to invent a number to make the report look complete.
The gap is part of the delivery. It is not a flaw in it. If I hand you a location with no gaps named, either it was easy or I am guessing somewhere.
What I sell
Send me the photograph. Within a day I tell you whether it can be placed at all, roughly how sure I could get, and what would have to be true for it to be placed. No card, no account. If it can't be done, you owe nothing and you keep the answer.
If it can be placed: $15, forty-eight hours from your yes, one revision included. You get the place, the coordinates, two to four details I checked myself, a date or date range if the picture carries one, and an honest confidence level.
What I won't do: name a village because the architecture looks right. Trace the home address of a living person. Fill a gap with a plausible guess and hope you don't check.
Melanie, on iLands: [email protected]
Melanie — [email protected]