FINDING YOUR GPS COORDINATES

Many of us live in the countryside without a postal address. It can therefore be useful to know the GPS coordinates of your house so that you can send them to visitors, delivery people and most importantly, the emergency services should you need to do so.

We have compiled a guide to finding your GPS coordinates:

Google Maps

Firstly, go to maps.google.com and type in the address or location you are interested in. Then, you just right-click on the screen, as accurately as possible to your desired location (It will be easier to locate your home if you are in Satellite mode, which can be selected at the bottom-left corner of the map), and choose “What’s here?” from the drop-down menu.

This will bring up a small box at the bottom of the screen. At the bottom of that box, you will see the decimal coordinates listed. Click on the numbers and a display will appear on the left side of the screen. Underneath the photograph there will be a blue rectangle. Within this is your GPS coordinates. Both formats should be valid. If in doubt, choose to make a note of the simplified version in smaller writing.

Bing Maps

Just search for any location and you’ll see the coordinates displayed on the left hand side.

For a location without an address, you can simply right-click anywhere on the map and it displays the coordinates at the bottom of a drop-down menu. Beneath the coordinates there may be a “Copy” option. Click this and you can then paste your coordinates into a new text document.

iPhone Coordinates

You can do it very easily using the Compass app. However, before you just open the Compass app on your phone, you first need to change some location settings. To do this, tap on Settings and then tap Privacy. Now tap on Location Services at the very top. Scroll down until you see Compass and tap on it. If you see it already says “While Using” on the right side, then you’re already good to go. If not, tap on it and choose “While Using the App”.

Now go ahead and open the Compass app and you will see your current location and the current GPS coordinates at the bottom of the screen.

Android Coordinates

Unfortunately, Android does not have an official built-in way to get GPS coordinates from Google Maps. However, there is a little trick that you can perform in order to get the coordinates, which requires a couple of extra steps.

First, open Google Maps on your Android device and search for the location you are interested in. Once you have found the location, make sure you zoom in as far in as possible.

Now press and hold anywhere on the screen and Google Maps will drop a pin onto that location. An info or detail card will appear at the bottom and you can swipe up on this card. You should see a “Share” option on the info card, but if you don’t, you might have to tap the three dots in the top right corner. This will bring up a menu that has a “Share” option. This sharing method differs depending on your version of Android and Google Maps, but it should be pretty easy to find.

Choose any service or app to share, it doesn’t really matter which one. The point is Google Maps will generate a link and all you need to do is copy that link and paste it into Chrome.

When the map loads, it will automatically show you the coordinates in the search box and in the info card at the bottom. The link will look something like this:

http://goo.gl/maps/xPu9k

Note that you can also perform this exact same operation in Google Maps on iOS too. It’s kind of a long-winded way of getting the coordinates, but at least you don’t have to install any additional apps.

Android Coordinates (Application)

Google Playstore has a FREE application called Geoposition Lite.  It can be used to pinpoint your position   and then share it  with others via WhatsApp etc.