Lat Lng Picker

How the Lat Lng Picker works

Lat lng picker: decimal degrees and formats

Latitude and longitude are what every mapping API, GPS unit, spreadsheet and form field expects, and the quickest way to get them for a specific spot is still to click it on a map. This picker shows the coordinates of the last pin you placed, to whatever precision you choose, and keeps a running list of every pin for when you need several — a set of site boundaries, the stops on a route, or the corners of a bounding box.

Precision. Six decimal places is about 11 centimetres at the equator, which is finer than any consumer GPS and the sensible default for storing coordinates. Four decimals is roughly 11 metres, good enough to identify a building; two decimals is a kilometre. More than six is noise from a map click. The zoom level is shown too, since it tells you how precise the click itself was: at zoom 18 a pixel is under a metre, at zoom 10 it is about 150 metres.

Which order? Humans and most APIs — Google Maps, GPS, the geo: URI scheme — write latitude first. GeoJSON, KML, PostGIS and most GIS software write longitude first, as x, y. Getting them the wrong way round puts your point in the ocean off Somalia, so both orders are shown and labelled; copy the one your destination wants.

Degrees, minutes and seconds. The DMS line is for older documents, marine charts and aviation, which still write positions as 51° 30' 26.4" N 0° 7' 39.9" W. To go the other way — from DMS, UTM or a pasted coordinate in any form to decimal — use the coordinate converter.

Several pins. Each click adds a pin, Undo point removes the last one, and every pin is draggable. The text box under the map lists them as CSV with a pin number, latitude and longitude, and Download CSV saves that list. The map tiles come from OpenStreetMap; nothing else leaves your browser.

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