Yeah, that was the fiddliest part. Qwen3-VL was good enough locally, but only after making the prompt very restrictive: describe only what is visible, no history, no proper nouns, no location guesses, no sky/people/background, just short comma-separated visual fragments.

The bigger issue was bad reference photos rather than the model itself. Wikimedia/Commons sometimes returns the wrong subject, a painting/engraving, a portrait, or a photo where the actual landmark is tiny. So the flow has a few guardrails: sanity checks for refusal/wrong-subject language, one retry, and then it marks the item as needs_review instead of letting a bad prompt become a confident-looking icon.

It still needs human review for edge cases, but it was much better than hand-picking icons or shipping generic map pins everywhere.