Coordinates to city

Formats it reads

Latitude first, then longitude, separated by a comma or a space. Use a minus sign or the letters S and W for south and west. Here’s the example, in downtown Seattle, written every way the box understands:

Each format was written with the same library the tool uses and read back: the difference is just each format’s rounding.

A long Google Maps, Apple Maps or OpenStreetMap link works too: we take the point from the link itself. Short share links (maps.app.goo.gl) don’t contain the coordinates, so open them first and copy the full page address.

How many decimals you need

Each decimal you drop makes the area the point could be in ten times bigger. At Seattle’s latitude, one step in the last decimal is this big:

Measured on the WGS84 ellipsoid with GeographicLib at 47.6° N. The east–west step shrinks as you go north: it’s wider in Miami than in Seattle.

Examples: from coordinates to city

A few points run through the tool. Airports and landmarks are a good test, because many of them sit outside the city they’re named after:

Looked up on October 31, 2026, with the Census Bureau’s TIGERweb boundaries.

JFK is inside New York City, in Queens County; LAX is inside the city of Los Angeles; and Seattle–Tacoma International gave its name to the city that grew around it, SeaTac. The top of Mount Rainier isn’t in any city: it’s unincorporated Pierce County.

Where your coordinates come from

• Photos: most phones store latitude and longitude in the photo’s details (its EXIF data).
• Google Maps: press and hold any spot and copy the numbers that appear.
• GPS units, fitness apps and hiking routes, usually exported as GPX.
• Spreadsheets and CRMs that store each customer or site as a point.
• Accident, insurance and field reports that record where something happened.

State Plane coordinates, in feet, aren’t supported: convert them to latitude and longitude first.

When the answer looks wrong

It’s almost always the order or a sign. Drop the minus sign from the Seattle example (“47.60621, 122.33207”) and you land in China; flip the latitude’s sign and you’re out in the South Pacific. If you paste the longitude first (“-122.33207, 47.60621”), the tool notices that -122 can’t be a latitude, swaps them back and tells you.

Very old maps and surveys may use NAD27 instead of the WGS84 and NAD83 coordinates used today, so their points can be shifted from where GPS puts them.