Hi, I recently imported my LocoKit database from Arc Timeline into Arc Editor (latest beta). However, there are many locations that appear as “Unknown place” in Editor which appear is a named location in Timeline.
These mainly appear to be locations which Timeline automatically tagged itself (rather than being manually tagged by me either through Google places or as a private place).
Is this a known issue and is there any way to correct this without manually tagging all the Unknown Places in Editor?
Hm. That’s definitely not a known issue! Let me have a think…
Ok so, I think my best guess is that for some reason the importer couldn’t import some of the Places in your old LocoKit / Arc Timeline database. Though I don’t have a guess yet as to why - that’s not something I’ve seen happen in any testing.
Unfortunately I don’t think deleting and reinstalling and repeating the import will help in this case. The importer is very robust, in the sense that it does what it can, exactly as it can, and will do that the same way every time. So if it made this mistake / had this failure the first time it’ll just do the same again next time. Damn.
Does it look like it’s Places that were quite common in your timeline? Or more rare ones? Like is it commonly used home or work Places? Or random ones on random days?
Although I guess it could be some Visits to some Places, with other Visits having that Place correctly assigned, and the Place itself correctly imported. Though that’d be even more bizarre, and for that case I don’t have any guesses at all. That’d mean the Place imported fine but for some mysterious reason the association between some Visits and that Place the connection was lost. So I think that’ll be the least likely case.
Does it look like it’s Places that were quite common in your timeline? Or more rare ones? Like is it commonly used home or work Places? Or random ones on random days?
It pretty much all auto-tagged places by Arc Timeline.
Whether they’re relatively rare places (like when travelling) or new places in my regular area (i.e. around where I live) doesn’t seem to make a difference.
I’m not sure whether repeated visits to auto-tagged places are also being marked as Unknown since, if I visit a place more than once, I tend to manually tag it using Google Places or as a private place.
Hello, today I fully used Arc Editor for the first time (and turned off Arc Timeline).
Turns out Arc Editor isn’t only tagging all auto-tagged Arc Timeline locations as “Unknown Place”, but also auto-tagging all places itself as such.
In other words, if Arc Editor detects any place which I have previously manually tagged (either through Google Places or as a private place), it correctly tags it as such, however, any place it auto-tags shows up as “Unknown Place”.
Hm. In Arc Editor this sounds like possibly correct behaviour. It won’t auto associate a Place to a Visit unless it’s got an exact match with a previously used Place. Like, if a Visit is within your Home place’s radius, that’s an exact match and it can auto associate it. But if the Visit falls just outside of the Home place’s radius, that’s not an exact match, so it will leave it as “Unknown Place”.
This is a very old behaviour, dating back to the earliest days of Arc Timeline app. I found in early testing that if a place was auto assigned based on “meh, close enough” the results were wrong more often than right, and it created more cleanup work than just leaving them unassigned.
Though some of the other behaviour you’re describing still sounds weirdly wrong to me! Especially the imported data - that should have come across exactly as it was in Arc Timeline app. I still don’t have any idea what’s going on there. But it’s still in mind - I’m still on the hunt!
Really? I’m surprised this is the case as with Arc Timelime I barely, if ever, had it auto-tag Unknown Place. It pretty much always tagged a new location with a named place, which was really helpful, even if incorrect.
For example, if I’m travelling and out all day, when I come home at the end of the day, I would have a bunch of named locations which I could fix with the help of the autotagged name and map. With Arc Editot however, I just have a bunch of Unknown Locations which is very hard to parse. This also means that I can barely be hands off with Arc Editor unlike Arc Timeline since it needs manual intervention more often.
Thanks, please let me know if you find a solution, as I’m surprised how different the behaviour is compared to Arc Timeline
Arc Editor uses the same logic as Arc Timeline. It’ll only auto associate a place if that’s an existing place with at least one confirmed previous use. If it’s just some random place picked up from Google Places that’s never been used before, it won’t be auto assigned, and the visit will be left as “Unknown Place”.
