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How can one get the street address and/or coordinates of any location on Google Maps with a minimum of fuss?

Google Calendar will spawn a window with a map to the location one specifies in the "where" field, however a lot of the time the location it picks is wrong. If you append the "where" with coordinates in the form of "Whitehorse Fish Ladder @60.69635,-135.0404" or use a street address it gets it right, but what if you don't have the address at the tip of your fingers?

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3 Answers 3

up vote 3 down vote accepted

If you have the full map at the tip of your fingers, you can right-click on any location and get "Directions From Here" or "Directions To Here", which populates the from/to box with Google's nearest approximation of where you clicked.

You can also use "What's Here" to set a marker, which will have a associated lat/long in the corner (but doesn't appear to find roads or addresses)

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this is fastest the most direct route of the answers posted. It is unfortunately unreliable in areas where the street address database is sparse or incomplete. Sometimes it will just pick the name of the nearest road, which may be many kilometers long, when coordinates would be better. –  matt wilkie Aug 30 '10 at 20:09
aaaaah, it's not quite so bad: to get coordinates only remove all existing google map directions (decheck anything resembling "directions to" at bottom left). It's when multiple destinations exist that the precise coords are exchanged for the fuzzy "such and such road". –  matt wilkie Aug 30 '10 at 20:13

You have a street address, and wish to find it's Lat/Lon (reverse geocoding)

  1. Turn on the LatLong ToolTip in the Google Maps site. (Details below).

now either...

  1. Search for the address in google maps. Hover the mouse over the marker that shows the location you want. alt textalt text -- OR --
  2. Use the google maps geocoding api for reverse geocoding. Eg.,-118.3981&sensor=false --OR--
  3. Search for the Lat/Long in the google maps search.alt textalt text

. .

You have a Lat/Long and wish to find the (nearest) address (geocoding)

  1. Use the google maps geocoding api.

a) Json result:,+Mountain+View,+CA&sensor=false

b) Xml result:,+Mountain+View,+CA&sensor=false

. . .

How do I turn on the LatLong Tool Tips?

alt text

alt text

alt text

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In this use case I have neither street address or Lat/Long at my disposal. Just a screen I can point at and ask "where is this?" –  matt wilkie Aug 30 '10 at 20:02
Yep, which is why I mentioned the LatLng Tool Tip at the end of my post. That gives u lat/long .. and from here u can then open up another browser tab, paste in the API text and use your lat/long that's displayed on the screen. That does reverse-geocoding. Works great for Australia (I'm from Melbourne) and most other countries. Definitely first world. –  Pure.Krome Aug 31 '10 at 23:54

Just drag the marker in the official v3 google maps api example

If you use FireFox you can use Google Maps and this snippet of javascript code and create a bookmark.

("",gApplication .getMap().getCenter()));

[can be, .ca , etc]

note: this only gets the centre of the map latitude and longitude the more zoomed in the higher the accuracy


for full instructions on creating a bookmark.

Another useful one is when you select an address (as you would copy and paste)


*just replace this code as above and create another bookmark.

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the drag marker example would be the perfect answer, providing simulataneous street address and coordinates in an easy to copy and paste form, if the marker was placed interactively initially. Perfect for anybody in Eastern Astrailia though ;-) –  matt wilkie Aug 30 '10 at 20:19

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