Introduction

Link: https://gralhix.com/list-of-osint-exercises/osint-exercise-004/
Difficulty:

For beginners: a) Easy, b) Easy, c) Medium  
For experts: a) Easy, b) Easy, c) Easy

Briefing:

This is a photo of a resort located on an island.  
a) What is the name of the resort?  
b) What are the coordinates of the island?  
c) In which cardinal direction was the camera facing when the photo was taken?

Click [here](https://gralhix.files.wordpress.com/2023/01/004.png) to open the photo on a new tab.

Attachment:

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Solution

I hate starting with a reverse image search without trying to find the location manually. I feel like it’s cheating and I don’t find it funny to find the location in seconds. My main goal is to improve my analysis skills not being the fastest guy to find the solution.

Maybe we won’t directly find the answer but at least we can identify important elements.

First, what do we know?
This is a resort located on an island. So probably a heavenly location somewhere where it is hot (southern hemisphere).

There are other islands around and we don’t see any other land in the distance.

Some possible matches could be: Philippines, Bahamas, Maldives, Malaysia, etc…

We can easily remove some locations because the topology doesn’t match.

Bahamas:

Too long lands, no enough vegetation.

Maldives:

"Circle islands", too much tourism.

In my opinion, after a lot of time playing Geoguessr, I would go for something like Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia or South Asia in general. But I could be wrong. Let’s run a reverse image search (finally???) to see if we can get a match:

Thankfully we have a match!
The first result tells us "Oan Resort". If we Google Maps that:

I wasn’t that bad about the location in south asia (hmm..). It is located in Micronesia, not far from Guam and Nothern Mariana Islands.

We switch to Google Earth to validate the location:

It validates the location!

We have the name of the resort, let’s retrieve the coordinates:

For the cardinal direction, we can also use Google Earth because it has a compass integrated:

On top right, there is the default compass showing the north. I added the other cardinal points related to the north and shown the direction of the photo (orange arrow).

The photo is facing NW.

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Flag

a) Oan Resort, Wonip, Chuuk, Micronesia
b) 7.363080, 151.755930
c) NW