How do I set an exact latitude and longitude?
You have a spot in mind — a coordinate pair from somewhere else, or a point you can see on a map — and you want that exact position rather than roughly the right city.
There are three ways to choose a place: click the map, search by name or address, or pick one you saved earlier. Decimal degrees is the form to type. And the thing nobody tells you: GPSLarp has no coordinate field and parses no coordinates itself, so a typed pair can fail to resolve where a click on the map cannot.
01Three ways to choose a place
- Click the map. A pin drops where you clicked. This is the direct route: the coordinates are the ones your click produced, and nothing has to interpret anything.
- Search by name or address. Type into the search box — a city, a landmark, a street address — and pick from the results.
- Pick a saved location. Places you keep are listed ready to use; see where saved locations are kept.
Clicking the map does one extra thing quietly. Having placed the pin, it asks a naming service what that point is called, in the background. If that lookup fails, the pin is named with its raw coordinates instead. Nothing is lost either way — the position is the position, and the name is only a label.
02What happens when you type a coordinate pair
This is the part worth reading properly, because it is not what the interface implies.
GPSLarp does no coordinate parsing. There is no field labelled latitude, no field labelled longitude, and no format the application itself understands. The search box hands whatever you type, as free text, to OpenStreetMap's Nominatim geocoder. A decimal pair like 48.8584, 2.2945 usually comes back with the right point — but that is Nominatim interpreting it, not GPSLarp reading it.
The app's own wording gives this away, if you have seen it: when a search matches nothing it says No place matched that. Try a city, a landmark, or “48.8584, 2.2945”. It is suggesting a string to search for, which is exactly what it is.
Two practical consequences follow, and they are the reason this page exists:
- Use decimal degrees. Negative latitude is south, negative longitude is west. That is the form most likely to be understood by the service on the other end.
- If a typed pair does not resolve, click the map. Do not retype it in a different format hoping to find the one the app wants — there is no such format. Clicking is the reliable route, and it is the one to reach for the moment a search comes back empty.
Degrees, minutes and seconds
Convert to decimal degrees first, then search for that. Degrees, plus minutes divided by 60, plus seconds divided by 3600 — so 48° 51′ 30″ N is 48 + 51/60 + 30/3600, which is 48.8583. Keep four or five decimal places; that is metres rather than streets.
A hemisphere letter becomes a sign: S and W are negative.
03Setting the place
01Open GPSLarp and select your iPhone
The place has to have somewhere to go. If the phone is not in the device list, that is the thing to fix first — GPSLarp can't find my iPhone.
02Choose the point
Click it on the map, or search for it, or take it from your saved locations. All three end in the same state: a pin on the map at the coordinates that will be sent.
03If you are working from a coordinate pair, type it as decimal degrees
Into the search box, comma-separated, latitude first. If it resolves, the pin lands where you meant.
04If it does not resolve, click the map instead
Zoom in far enough that the click is precise, then click. There is nothing to reformat and nothing to retry — this path does not consult a geocoder at all.
05Set it
Confirming sends those coordinates to the phone over the connection GPSLarp is holding. This is teleport: one message rather than a journey — the app sends the new position, not a path to it, so there is nothing in between for anything to read. What the phone does with it is where this page stops; see the location didn't change for how to check on the phone itself.
04What this mode does not do
It does not travel. A point on another continent is sent directly, with nothing in between — no intermediate positions and no time spent covering the distance. If you want a position that moves along real streets, use walking or driving a route, or push it around by hand with the joystick.
Search does not work offline. The app says so itself: search uses OpenStreetMap's Nominatim, so it needs the internet. Clicking the map needs the internet too, for the map tiles. What that leaves you with on a dead connection is on using GPSLarp without an internet connection.
It does not hold after the connection ends. The override exists only while GPSLarp is running and connected to the phone — which is also the easiest way to undo it, covered on putting the real location back.
05If the place will not resolve
The search comes back empty. Try a landmark or a street address rather than a coordinate pair, and if that also fails, click the map. An empty result is the geocoder saying it did not recognise the text, which is a fact about the text rather than about your coordinates.
The pin is right but the name looks wrong. That is the background naming lookup, not the position. A pin labelled with bare coordinates is a pin whose name lookup failed and whose coordinates are exactly what you clicked.
Everything on the Mac looks correct and the phone disagrees. That is a different problem with its own page — I picked a place and my iPhone's location didn't change.
The honest limit of this page: it describes how to get a precise pair of coordinates into GPSLarp and what the application then sends. What a particular iPhone does with them has not been demonstrated end to end by anybody here, so this page stops where the Mac stops.