What mountain is this?

To find out what mountain you're looking at, you need two things: where you're standing and which direction you're facing. Point a mountain identifier app at it and it labels the summit from your GPS position and compass heading. Without an app, take a compass bearing to the peak and follow that line across a topographic map until it meets a summit.

Why position and direction are the whole problem

A mountain looks different from every side. The Matterhorn's hooked profile on chocolate boxes is the view from Zermatt; from the valleys to the west and south it's a different shape. So a picture of a mountain, on its own, is a weak clue. What makes an identification certain is geometry: if you know exactly where you are and exactly which way you're looking, there's only one summit along that line at that height.

Names don't help as much as you'd hope. The peak database inside our app, built from OpenStreetMap, holds 687,599 summits, and plenty of them share a name. There are 14 summits called Mount Adams and 16 called Mount Washington. These are the most repeated names of all:

That's why every reliable method below starts from your position, not from the mountain's appearance.

Four ways to find out, fastest first

1. Use an augmented reality identifier app. Hold your phone up and it labels each summit in the camera view, using GPS for your position, the compass for your heading, and a terrain model to work out what's visible. This is the quickest method by far, and the one that copes best with ranges full of similar peaks. See how mountain identifier apps work.
2. Take a bearing and use a map. Point a compass at the peak, read the bearing, and draw that line on a topographic map from where you stand. The first summit of the right height along the line is your mountain. Our map and compass guide walks through it step by step.
3. Work from the photo. If you only have a picture, check whether it carries a location tag. On an iPhone, open the photo and swipe up to see where it was taken. Then look along the likely direction on a 3D map. The full method is in how to identify a mountain from a photo.
4. Ask people who know the area. Regional hiking forums such as 14ers.com (Colorado) and SummitPost regularly name peaks from photos. Say where you stood and which way you faced. Without that, you'll get guesses.

Clues that narrow it down by eye

If you're working without a phone, a few things are worth noticing before the view changes:

• Snow and glaciers tell you about height relative to the neighbors. In late summer, the peak still holding snow is usually the tallest nearby.
• Shape is distinctive for volcanoes. A lone cone standing apart from the range around it is often the best-known peak in the region, like Mount Hood from Portland or Mount Fuji from Tokyo.
• Apparent size misleads. A nearby foothill can look taller than a far bigger peak behind it. The curve of the Earth also hides the base of distant mountains: at 100 km, more than 600 meters of a mountain can be below your horizon. Our guide to how far you can see a mountain has the numbers.
• What's in front matters. A summit you can see over a ridge has to be taller, or farther away and taller still. That's the core of working out which mountains you can see from where you are.

Where Mountain Identifier: Peaks fits

Our app does the first method. Point your iPhone at the skyline and it puts a label on each visible summit with its name, elevation and distance. It traces the terrain between you and every peak within 80 km and leaves out the ones a nearer ridge hides, so you don't get a label floating over a mountain you can't see. If the compass is a few degrees off, drag the labels sideways to line them up.

It can also suggest the peak in a photo you took earlier. That mode uses an AI model with the photo's location as a hint, so treat its answer as a suggestion and check anything surprising. Both modes are part of the Pro subscription; the app is free to download.

Frequently asked questions