Where to get the real-world coordinates for a spot

An Anchor Point needs a pair of numbers: the latitude and longitude of the place your chosen spot on the image shows. There are three ways to get them and they are all straightforward once you know what a wrong one looks like.

The format the editor wants

Decimal degrees, latitude first. Two plain numbers:

Field	Example	Range
Latitude	`55.67254`	−90 to 90. Positive north of the equator
Longitude	`12.56571`	−180 to 180. Positive east of Greenwich

Five decimal places is about a metre, which is more than enough. Six is harmless; two is not — 55.67 is a kilometre out.

Not degrees-minutes-seconds (55° 40′ 21″ N), and not a comma as the decimal separator. If your source gives you either, convert first.

Way 1: from a mapping site, at your desk

The ordinary case, and it costs a minute per point.

In any web map, find the exact feature, right-click the spot, and copy the coordinates it offers. Most mapping sites put a latitude and longitude on the context menu or in the address bar, in that order, as decimals — which is exactly what you need.

Then paste them somewhere before you start, in a list you can work from:

Spot on the image	Latitude	Longitude
Main gate	55.67254	12.56571
Car park, NW corner	55.67491	12.56102
Bridge	55.67108	12.56890

⚠️ Take the coordinates from the feature, not from the label. A search result for a venue drops its coordinates on the middle of the venue, or on the postal address, or on whatever the mapping site thinks the centre is — none of which is the gate you clicked on your image. Zoom right in and pick the spot yourself.

Way 2: from the venue

Anybody who runs a site with utilities, deliveries or emergency access has coordinates written down somewhere. Ask for the gate positions, the access points or the plan the fire service works from. It is often faster than deriving them, and it is more likely to be right.

Way 3: on site, with your phone

Stand at the spot and let FriendTrack record where you are. This is the accurate option for anything a mapping site draws badly — a temporary layout, a stage that moves each year, the middle of a field with no features. It is also slower and requires you to be there. See capture anchors on site.

The four mistakes, in the order they happen

1. Latitude and longitude swapped. The commonest by a distance. In Denmark, latitude is 55-something and longitude is 12-something, so a swap is obvious once you look — but the editor cannot know which you meant, and it will happily project your festival onto a spot off Somalia. Check that your latitudes all start with the same one or two digits, and your longitudes too.

2. A missing minus sign. Longitudes west of Greenwich and latitudes south of the equator are negative. Dropping the sign puts the Map in the wrong hemisphere, and every anchor is wrong in the same direction — so the error figure still looks fine.

3. Degrees-minutes-seconds pasted as decimals. 55° 40′ 21″ is 55.67250, not 55.4021. If a number has more than about three digits after the point in a suspicious pattern, check the source format.

4. The right coordinates for the wrong spot. You clicked the north gate on the image and looked up the south gate on the map. This one produces a high error figure and is exactly what the heat map is for — read the accuracy heat map.

How to check yourself before you calibrate

Look at your list of three-to-six pairs as a block. All latitudes should be within a few hundredths of each other, and all longitudes likewise, because your venue is small. Any pair that is not is the mistake, and finding it in a table is far quicker than finding it on a map.

A worked example

A ski area, coordinates from a web map at a desk.

You pick four features on the piste map: the base station, the top station, the mid-station restaurant and the far end of the nursery slope.
For each you zoom right in on the mapping site — onto the building itself, not the resort’s label — right-click and copy the pair.
Your list reads 46.93xxx / 9.84xxx four times over. The pattern is consistent, so no pair is swapped and none is missing a sign.
You enter all four in the editor. The Calibration Quality figure reads 4.1 px — Fair — which for a mountain read off a schematic piste map is a good result, since the map is not to scale everywhere.

Had one longitude come back as -9.84xxx, all four anchors would have been fitted anyway and the figure would have been enormous, sending you straight to the heat map.