---
id: reverse-geocoder
version: "1.5.1"
license: lgpl
license_treatment: copyleft
maintenance: abandoned
---

# reverse_geocoder — Fast, offline reverse geocoder

License: copyleft · Maintenance: abandoned · Downloads: 374.1K/mo

## What it is and what it does

Reverse Geocoder is an offline geocoding library that takes latitude/longitude pairs and returns the nearest town or city along with administrative regions (admin1 and admin2), country code, and coordinates. It uses a parallelized K-D tree for spatial lookups, making it faster than earlier reverse-geocoding approaches. The package returns structured data including place name, country code, and hierarchical administrative divisions.

The library is designed for batch lookups of multiple coordinates at once. It requires no network calls and operates entirely from bundled or custom data sources. However, the package has been abandoned since its last release in 2016-09-15, with no updates to address Python version changes or data freshness, making it a legacy tool that may require manual maintenance or verification before use in production environments.

Use it for:

- Batch reverse-geocoding of GPS coordinates from location logs without external API calls.
- Mapping latitude/longitude data to administrative regions for geographic analysis or reporting.
- Offline location name lookup in applications where network access is unavailable or undesirable.
- Enriching coordinate datasets with city and country information for data processing pipelines.
- Custom geocoding workflows using your own geographic data source instead of a public API.

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

Reverse Geocoder converts latitude/longitude coordinates into the nearest town, city, and administrative regions, returning results offline with a K-D tree implementation.

No, not recommended for new projects. The package is abandoned (last release 2016-09-15), has high install friction, and python_support is unspecified. While it has no known vulnerabilities and lgpl licensing is transparent, the lack of maintenance and unclear Python compatibility make it a risky choice for production use.

## Install

pip install reverse-geocoder
uv add reverse-geocoder
poetry add reverse-geocoder

## Installing reverse_geocoder

Before you install: High install friction: the package is abandoned (last release 2016-09-15, last commit 2023-03-19) with no runtime dependencies listed, suggesting it may require manual data setup or system-level dependencies not captured in metadata.

License in practice: Licensed under lgpl (copyleft), which requires that derivative works and modifications remain under the same license; redistribution of this package in proprietary software requires careful compliance review.

Quickstart:

import reverse_geocoder as rg
coordinates = [(51.5214588, -0.1729636), (9.936033, 76.259952)]
results = rg.search(coordinates)
# Returns list of dicts with 'name', 'cc', 'lat', 'lon', 'admin1', 'admin2'

Package is abandoned; data files and Python support may require manual verification or updates to work with current Python versions.

Verify before relying:

- Whether bundled geocoding data is current and complete for all regions.
- Compatibility with modern Python versions given unspecified python_support.
- Performance characteristics of the K-D tree implementation on large coordinate batches.
- Whether custom data sources can be loaded without modifying package internals.

## Package facts

- License: lgpl (copyleft)
- Python support: unspecified
- Install friction: high
- Maintenance: abandoned
- Downloads: 374.1K/month (top 15,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

reverse geocoding coordinates, lat lon to city lookup, latitude longitude to address, offline geocoding, coordinate to location name, K-D tree geocoding, administrative region lookup, offline-geocoding, abandoned-package, spatial-indexing

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