1. A computer-implemented process for location recognition using a query image depicting a location it is desired to identify and a database of features associated with images of known locations, comprising using a computer to perform the following process actions: generating query image features representative of the query image using the same technique as used to generate the database features resident in the database from the known location images; for each feature associated with the query image, inputting the query image feature into an informative feature vocabulary tree and identifying a visual word output by the vocabulary tree for that query image feature, wherein the informative feature vocabulary tree was generated using just those database features that have been deemed informative of the known locations and was used to assign visual words to each known location image that are output from the tree whenever a database feature associated with that image is input into the tree; identifying the known location image having the most visual words in common with the query image; and designating the location associated with the identified known location image as the location depicted in the query image.