The map squares are pictures from OpenStreetMap, so looking at a place does ask their server for that area. Everything else — the coordinates, the conversions, and your own position if you ask for it — happens on your device and is never sent anywhere.
About GPS Coordinates
Click any spot on the map and read its latitude and longitude straight away, written out in all the formats you might be asked for. Or press Use my location and let your device tell you where you are.
No account, no sign-up, no watermark on anything. It works the same on a phone as on a computer.
The two questions this page answers
Most people arrive here with one of two problems, and they are opposites.
"I know the place, I need the numbers." You can see the spot on a map — a gate, a field, a trailhead, a building entrance — and something is asking you to type in coordinates. Click it, and copy the numbers out.
"I have my own position and need to share it." Press *Use my location*, and your phone or laptop works out where it is. Then send the numbers, or the map link, to whoever needs them.
If you have the numbers already and want to see where they are, that is the other direction — use Coordinates to Map instead.
Which format do you need?
This is the part that trips people up. There is only one location, but at least four ways to write it, and software is fussy about which one it accepts. The page shows all of them at once so you never have to guess.
Decimal degrees — 37.579617, 126.977041
The modern default. Almost every website, app, spreadsheet and programming library wants this one. If you are not sure, use this.
Degrees, minutes, seconds — 37°34'46.62"N 126°58'37.35"E
The classic form, from paper maps and atlases. Legal documents, land records and older systems still use it. A degree splits into 60 minutes, and a minute into 60 seconds — the same as a clock, which is where the names come from.
Degrees and decimal minutes — 37°34.777'N 126°58.622'E
The odd one in the middle: whole degrees, then minutes with a decimal, and no seconds at all. This is what marine chartplotters and aviation GPS use, so if you are working with boats or aircraft, this is probably the one being asked for.
Plain signed pair — 37.579617,126.977041
The same numbers as decimal degrees with nothing else — no degree symbol, no N or E, no space. Minus means south or west. This is what you paste into code, a CSV file or a search box.
How accurate is this, and how many decimals should you keep?
A coordinate is only as precise as the number of digits you keep, and people routinely keep far too many or far too few.
Because latitude lines are evenly spaced everywhere on Earth, each decimal place is worth a fixed distance:
- 2 decimals — about 1.1 km. A town.
- 3 decimals — about 110 m. A block.
- 4 decimals — about 11 m. A building.
- 5 decimals — about 1.1 m. A door.
- 6 decimals — about 11 cm. More than a phone can actually measure.
- 7 decimals — about 1 cm. Survey equipment territory.
For almost everything, five decimal places is plenty and six is generous. Anything past seven is writing down noise, not location. Longitude behaves the same way at the equator and gets finer as you move towards the poles, so quoting the latitude figure is the safe way to describe a coordinate's precision.
Whole degrees are not a location
This catches people out constantly. If you write 37, 126 instead of 37.5796, 126.9770, you have not given a rough position near Seoul — you have given a point in a field about 90 km away. One whole degree of latitude is roughly 111 km in any direction.
The rule: never drop the decimals. If a form only takes whole numbers, it is not asking for coordinates.
What "Use my location" actually does
Pressing that button asks your browser's location feature, and your browser asks you for permission first. Nothing happens until you agree.
Where the answer comes from depends on the device:
- A phone outdoors — real GPS satellites. Usually accurate to a few metres.
- A phone indoors — mostly nearby Wi-Fi networks. Tens of metres, sometimes better.
- A laptop — nearly always Wi-Fi, occasionally just the network. Anywhere from 20 m to several kilometres.
The page tells you the accuracy your device reported, and zooms to match it, so a rough fix does not get framed like a precise one.
This is not the same as an IP address lookup. An IP address points at your internet provider and often gets the city wrong; this asks the device itself. If you want to see that difference for yourself, What Is My IP shows the IP-based guess side by side with what your browser gives away.
Reading coordinates you have been given
Two habits will save you most of the trouble people have with coordinates.
Latitude always comes first. Latitude is north–south and never goes past 90. Longitude is east–west and goes to 180. So if the first number is bigger than 90, the pair has been written backwards — a very common mistake when data moves between systems, because some mapping software genuinely does put longitude first.
Watch the sign and the letter. -33.86 and 33.86S are the same place. Mixing them — writing -33.86S — flips it to the northern hemisphere. Use one or the other, never both.
What you can do with it
- Find the coordinates of a house, gate, field or trailhead to send to someone
- Get a precise point for a delivery or a meeting spot that has no street address
- Fill in a form that wants latitude and longitude rather than an address
- Set a geofence, camera position, or drone waypoint
- Give emergency services an exact position when there is no address to give
- Check a coordinate in a document by seeing where it actually lands
- Convert a coordinate someone sent you into the format your software needs
Features
- Click anywhere on the map, or drag the pin to fine-tune
- Use my location for your device's own position, with the accuracy it reports
- All five formats at once — decimal, DMS, decimal minutes, plain pair and a geo: link
- Copy any single format, or all of them together
- Open the same spot in OpenStreetMap or Google Maps
- Works on phones, and the pin is easy to drag with a thumb
- No account, no sign-up, nothing saved
Good to know
- The map pictures come from OpenStreetMap. Drawing a map means asking their servers for the squares around that spot — that part cannot happen offline. The coordinates and conversions are worked out on your device.
- Zoom in before you click. At world zoom a single pixel covers kilometres, so a click there is a rough guess however many decimals it prints.
- Coordinates are not addresses. This page will not turn a coordinate into a street address, or an address into a coordinate — that needs an address database, which is a different kind of service.
- The Earth is not a perfect sphere, so coordinates depend on the reference system used. Everything here uses WGS 84, which is what GPS, phones and web maps all use. You only need to care if you are working with old survey data.
Common questions
How do I find the GPS coordinates of a place?
Open the map above, zoom in on the spot, and click it. The coordinates appear straight away in five formats. Zooming in first matters more than anything else: at world zoom a single pixel covers several kilometres, so a click there is a rough guess no matter how many decimals it prints.
Which comes first, latitude or longitude?
Latitude first, then longitude. Latitude is the north-south value and never goes past 90; longitude is the east-west value and goes to 180. That is the convention almost everywhere, and it is also how you spot a reversed pair: if the first number is bigger than 90 it cannot be a latitude.
How many decimal places do GPS coordinates need?
Five is enough for almost everything. Each decimal place of latitude is a fixed distance: two places is about 1.1 km, four is about 11 m, five is about 1.1 m, and six is about 11 cm. A phone GPS is doing well at 3 to 5 m, so anything past six decimals records measurement noise rather than a location.
Is a GPS coordinate the same as a street address?
No. A coordinate is a point on the ground; an address is a postal record kept by a national or local authority. Many places have coordinates but no address at all, such as a field, a trailhead or a boat mooring. Turning one into the other needs an address database, which this tool does not use.
Why is my location wrong or not precise?
If you used the map, check the zoom level before you clicked. If you used the location button, the answer came from your device: outdoors a phone uses real GPS satellites and is accurate to a few metres, but indoors and on laptops it falls back to nearby Wi-Fi networks, which can be tens of metres to several kilometres out. The page shows the accuracy your device reported.
Can I get coordinates without an internet connection?
Not the map. The map squares are pictures fetched from OpenStreetMap, so drawing them needs a connection. Your device's own position does not: that comes from GPS hardware and works offline, though a page has to be loaded already to show it.
Related tools
- Coordinates to Map — the other direction: paste coordinates, see the place
- Coordinate Converter — convert between the formats, with no map at all
- What Is My IP — the far rougher location an IP address gives
- Image Metadata Viewer — see the coordinates hidden inside a photo
- Blur Part of an Image — hide something before you share it
How to use it
- Zoom in to the area you care about — this matters more than anything else
- Click the spot, or drag the pin onto it
- Copy the format you have been asked for, or press *Copy every format*
- Or press Use my location to read your own position instead
