As a GIS professional, who hasn't been driven mad by the manual georeferencing of historical imagery? When rushing to meet project deadlines, the author often had to hunch over the screen, scrutinizing scanned maps for control points — they had to be "timeless" features like road intersections, bridges, or landmark buildings. If the old map was blurry or the landmark had been demolished, it meant digging through archives all over again. Then, switching to ArcGIS, we would painstakingly align points one by one against a reference basemap, manually inputting latitude and longitude coordinates. Each point had to be checked three times, fearing a single entry error could throw the entire map out of alignment. What's even more torturous is that too few control points compromise accuracy, while too many can introduce distortion. And when batch-processing aerial photos? That meant burning the midnight oil in front of the computer, repeating the tedious operations until your fingers trembled.
The scene described by the author is sure to send shivers down the spines of many, a true nightmare. However, in 2026, AI is finally starting to save (or take over the jobs of) GIS drafters. In a previous article, "QGIS Map Georeferencing Tutorial (with AI)", the author introduced an AI georeferencing plugin for QGIS, but its performance was somewhat lacking. Recently, @yaoyao, author of Kongtian Perception, recommended a tool to the author: georeferencer.ai. Let's take a look at it today.
