How to use it
- Type the address or place name and press Search.
- If several places match, pick the right one from the list.
- Read the coordinates in every format. Click a value to copy it. Drag the pin if it is a little off.
- For a list of addresses switch to Batch, paste one per line, and download the CSV.
5 practical uses
- Get the coordinates of an address for a GPS, a drone flight plan or a form.
- Convert a list of customer addresses to points for a map or a spreadsheet.
- Find the coordinates of a landmark for a geocache or a photo caption.
- Turn a venue address into UTM or MGRS for a grid reference.
- Check where a geocoder places an address before relying on it.
The maths behind it
Geocoding is a search over an index built from the map's own tiles: the address is split into words, matched against place, street and postcode names with a ranked full-text index, the house number is read from the tiles over the street, and the best match is returned with its position. The formats are then computed in the browser: DMS by splitting the degrees into minutes and seconds, UTM and MGRS by the transverse Mercator projection formulas, the geohash by bit interleaving, and the plus code by base-20 encoding.
The formats
Decimal degrees are what most software wants, latitude first, negative for south and west. Degrees-minutes-seconds is the traditional notation. UTM and MGRS are metric grids used on topographic maps and by the military. A geohash and a plus code are short strings that stand for a place; see the geohash and plus code converters.
Places are looked up with Waymorphic Map's own search on the tile domain, built from the same OpenStreetMap data as the map: places, streets, addresses and postcodes, free and without a key. An address is only as good as the map: in a well-mapped town it is the door, in the countryside it may be the road or the village.