GPS Visualizer's Elevation Lookup Utility

Find elevations using a Web Service/API (USGS or Google)

NOTE: To look up elevations using Google, you'll need to get your own Google Maps API key. If your data is from the United States, Canada, or Mexico, you can select USGS 3DEP as the source, and no key is needed. If you have data from outside North America, and you don't want to hassle with an API key, and NASA's 30m-resolution data will suffice, you may just want to use GPS Visualizer's plain-text converter (more info).

Latitude/longitude input:

Input: Source:
Field separator in output: Units in output:

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Results as text:

data type:

output format:

Labels on map

[more form options]

To use this free utility, simply enter coordinates in the box to the left, one per line, and click "Find elevations" to look up their elevations. If your data is in a tabular format with a descriptive header at the top of each column, choose "tabular" for the type of input data (and make sure the headers make sense!).

If you have raw coordinate pairs, that's okay too, but make sure the latitudes come BEFORE the longitudes.

Note that any existing elevation information in your data will be preserved. if you want to completely overwrite the existing elevations, the quickest solution is to "hide" the altitude or elevation column by changing its header to something unrecognizable, like "zzz".

How this page works

Many mapping sites provide an "API" -- a way for other programs to quickly and easily access their services. But some of them only allow a certain number of queries per day, based on your "key" or other credentials. This form uses JavaScript-On-Demand (JSON) code that causes your Web browser to be the one making the request (rather than gpsvisualizer.com's server).

Lookup limits

Google allows each user to perform a few thousand lookups per day. For most individuals, that's more than enough, but if all of GPS Visualizer's users were allowed to perform as many queries as they want, the quota would be reached quickly. That's why there's a slot where you can enter YOUR key. When you use your key on this page, you get the benefits of nearly unlimited lookups without having to do any programming.

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