The Locations blog
Plain-English guides to reading, converting and measuring GPS coordinates — written to answer the questions people actually search for.
The My Location App: GPS & Coordinate Tools in Your Pocket The same coordinate work you do on locations.app, but in your pocket and offline. Read your latitude and longitude with an accuracy figure, convert between every format, drop and share a pin, and measure distance or midpoint — all without a signal.
How to Convert Decimal Degrees to Degrees, Minutes, Seconds (and Back) Your phone says 40.748817 but your chart wants 40 deg 44 min 55.7 sec N. Here is the exact arithmetic both ways, with two fully worked examples and a sign-to-direction table.
How to Calculate the Distance Between Two Coordinates (Haversine, Made Simple) Two lat/long pairs in, one distance out. Learn the great-circle concept, work the Haversine formula through a full example, use the 111-km-per-degree rule of thumb, and see exactly why flat Pythagorean distance gets long spans wrong.
How to Read Latitude and Longitude: Which Comes First and What the Signs Mean Someone hands you 40.7128, -74.0060 and expects you to do something with it. Which number is which, which comes first, and what is that minus sign for? Here is how to read any pair of coordinates correctly — the lat-first rule, the sign-to-direction map, and the bugs that flip you across the world.
How to Find the Midpoint Between Two Locations (Meet in the Middle) Want to meet a friend halfway? Learn what a geographic midpoint really is, when simple coordinate averaging works, when you need the true great-circle midpoint, and how to turn the answer into a shareable map pin.
How Many Decimal Places Do GPS Coordinates Need? A Precision Cheat Sheet Each decimal place of a latitude or longitude is worth a specific distance on the ground. Here is the famous decimal-places-to-meters table, why five places is the everyday sweet spot, the cosine-of-latitude catch for longitude, and how to stop reporting fake precision.
How to Find a Place From Its Coordinates (and Drop a Pin Anywhere) Someone sends you a place with no name yet, just two numbers. Here is how to paste a coordinate pair into map search and land on the exact spot, the comma-separated decimal-degree format every map expects, why fewer than four decimals fails, and how to drop and share a pin so the next person lands where you did.
Latitude vs Longitude: Which Is Which (and an Easy Way to Remember) Latitude or longitude — which is which? Learn which lines run flat and which run up and down, how the equator and Prime Meridian set the zeros, how they slice the globe into hemispheres, and a memory trick that finally makes it stick.
Why Is My GPS Location Wrong? 9 Causes and How to Fix Each The blue dot jumps across the street or lands in the wrong building. A wrong GPS location is rarely a broken phone. Diagnose which of nine causes you're seeing, fix it, then run a quick accuracy test to prove the dot finally lands where you stand.
What Is a Geohash? Short Location Strings Explained Simply You keep seeing short strings like u4pruydqqvj in URLs and APIs — clearly about a place, but nothing like latitude and longitude. That's a geohash. Here's the grid-cutting idea behind it, why it uses Base32 letters, how nearby places share a prefix, and a precision-by-length table.
How Accurate Is GPS, Really? What the Accuracy Number Means That little circle around your blue dot is your phone admitting “I think you’re here, give or take this much.” Here’s what the ± metres accuracy number really means, what quietly makes it worse, and how to pull a tighter, more trustworthy GPS fix.
UTM vs MGRS: What's the Difference and When to Use Each UTM and MGRS look totally different yet point to the same spot, because MGRS is just UTM repackaged. Learn how each is read, how digit count sets precision, who uses which, and how to translate between them without losing a meter.
Latitude & Longitude Formats: DD, DMS, UTM, MGRS and Plus Codes The same spot can be written five different ways. Here is what decimal degrees, DMS, UTM, MGRS, and Plus Codes each mean, how to read them, worked examples, and a plain answer to which format you should actually use.
What Are UTM Coordinates? Zones, Easting & Northing Explained Topographic maps and survey reports often list positions like 13S 517391E 4283505N instead of latitude and longitude. This guide explains the UTM grid in plain language: what the 60 zones are, how to read easting and northing in meters, when UTM beats lat/long, and a full worked example you can follow step by step.
What Are Plus Codes (Open Location Code)? A plain-English guide to Plus Codes (Open Location Code): how they encode any place on Earth, how to read the format, the difference between short and full codes, and how to convert them to and from coordinates.