Is there a way to do a mass export of every timeline image? The majority of days require re-confirmation and every few weeks there’s a day that gets sucked into a mega segment that I have to parse out. I did a trade-in for my old phone so I can’t keep it for long therefore I can’t keep it and its correct Arc as reference to speed up the reconfirmations and to figure out how to parse out the mega segments. Exporting the timeline as an image isn’t the quickest thing either because it doesn’t export with what day it is, so I have to do it in a way more tedious fashion of saving to files so I can name it appropriately and doing this for 1800+ days is just not going to work. Any ideas would be most welcome as to how to get to keep that old-phone Arc data for reference or to get that new-phone data importing more cleanly with confirmations kept. (It’s not just a matter of hitting ok either. There was a long train trip where I had to mark each segment as train instead of car, and lots of buses get marked as walking or cycling etc. (This is on the new phone with importing data and going into imported days to check accuracy.)
Partially yes. Though when Arc is doing timeline processing it’s often deleting TimelineItems (eg when it’s merging two Visit items together, so one of them is kept and the other deleted). So it’s likely that a lot of dependent TimelineItem ids will be different.
I’ve been through this so many times 
When building and testing the backup/restore system over the years a bunch of times I’ve accidentally clobbered all my TimelineItem files, leaving my years of data restored completely unedited. It then takes me months to gradually go through and clean it up as best I remember. A painful learning process, that did at least expose a lot of bugs and edge cases in the system over time. Though clearly not all of them 
Eek. Sounds like you’ve already gone through all the steps I would have too. That one makes no sense to me. If the samples are there, the samples get restored no matter what - especially if you “import ignoring missing dependents”. So… yeah… that’s one I haven’t seen before. I’m confused about that.
Unless the samples have for some reason been shoved into one of the edge timeline items. Like, they’re hiding inside the Individual Segments view of the item at the start or end of the gap. I don’t know how they’d get in there, but that’s easier for me to imagine than them not being imported at all…
Heh, yeah, I really thought it would happen a while back! It just slipped out of one of the updates, because I ran out of time. Then when I ran the next poll suddenly no one seemed to care about it anymore 
I think it’s one of those things no one cares about at all unless they run up against one of these problems, then it briefly becomes top priority
Yeah definitely. I’ve moved the “Import from Arc JSON” todo into my top priority category again, so hopefully I’ll get a chance to do it soon. (Though unfortunately I think I’m going to be bogged down for at least the next week with the migration from Foursquare to Google Places - a whole other nightmare. Sigh)
I wish. The exporting of timeline to image is another area where things go wrong sometimes. If the timeline is too long (or has too many photo thumbnails in it) iOS just exports a blank image, without telling Arc that there’s nothing in it
I think timeline images is going to be a non-starter. As you say, 1800+ days is just too much. The best way out of this mess is going to be getting a full, complete backup from the old phone, and restoring that on the new phone without incident.
Which is absolutely doable. I’ve done it probably over 100 times over the years on my test phones and main phone. It’ll just be a matter of first getting that full complete backup, so that you’ve safely got your full data in the correct form, then figuring out what’s making it so troublesome to import back in.
If you do get that full complete backup, then you could email a zip of it to me (or host it somewhere I guess - it’ll be too big for email) and I could do a bunch of test imports on a test device here, to debug what’s going wrong.
I’ve done it so many times over the years that I’m confident I can get it all imported cleanly. It’ll just be a matter of finding what’s going wrong with the import. (And also why your old phone is weirdly not completing a full backup - I’ve never seen that part go wrong, so that’s especially weird. Typically the backup process is completely solid, and it’s the restore that’s sometimes troublesome.)
Ah! Ok that makes sense. Might that contribute to why the majority of days need reconfirmation? I’m also noticing that some of the days that are merging into a big glob are the ones where I did a lot of manual separating out of locations and movement. So maybe since those days didn’t fit Arc’s original logic anyway, it’s having extra trouble figuring it out on the import.
Ouch!! And then repeat every time you’ve got some major testing going on! Thank you for soldiering on through the ordeal.
Something like that is what happened when I imported that day into the old phone that thought I was home all day! All the data was hidden within the home location, which makes sense actually. In this case the data just ended at 2:06pm! BUT magically, I woke up to Arc realizing that data was there after all! Maybe Arc was just tired of me clobbering it with requests and needed the night away from my poking to sort itself out. 
Hooray! I’ll remember to vote for it next time too. Even though it’ll be outvoted again. Ha! And good luck on the migration! I’m so curious to see if I stick with Swarm after this or if that was purely motivated by Arc (and Gyroscope before that).
Given how much my old phone is resisting a full backup in one go, and not knowing how long it’ll take, I’m just letting it backup so I have as much of that data as possible before I wipe it out and return it. And meanwhile, I’m importing that combo data into my new phone manually and scanning for merged days as I go so I can fix those while I have my old phone. I even have a printout of year calendars from 2018 to 2023 to keep track of where I’m at! Good thing my freelance work is very slow right now I guess?
Oh that is very good to know. A feature suggestion that I’m guessing no one else cares about buuuut in the event that it’s not a massive PITA… I’d love to be able to export an image with the date on top. After this whole backup/import rigmarole, I’m saving the timeline image at the end of every day so I have my decisions / confirmations cemented for future times in the event that I have to figure out what happened that day again. And while I plan to include the date in the file names, it’ll just be an extra layer of helpfulness to have the date in the image itself.
Thank you, much appreciated!
Another entertaining thing about Arc learning my movements from scratch before the old days starting getting imported is seeing how all of my walk segments are half walk half run segments. I used to live in NYC and apparently still walk like I live there. I haven’t bicycled much lately but I remember Arc always clocking my cycling as driving, which I also found entertaining!
Hah. Ok, yet another mystery I can’t explain So much weird going on. But at least that one is a good mystery.
Yeah I’m curious about that too. I still check in to everywhere with Swarm from the button in Arc. But I don’t actually use the Swarm app anymore for anything. So it’s kind of just habit and tradition now. Even so, I’m not going to feel good about losing the ability to do those check ins - I’ve been doing it for so many years, it’s just part of life.
Sounds like a slog 
But as long as the samples are all there, at least you don’t lose anything. It just means the cleanup job is longer 
I think literally two other people have asked for that over the years. But I feel stupid for not putting it there in the first place - it’s such an obvious thing that I should’ve done in the first place - so it’s always been sitting in my semi-high priority todos. I’ll nudge it up to the top priority again now.
Hah, yeah I find the same. I’m a fast walker, slow runner, and cycle everywhere. So whenever I take a taxi it thinks I’m cycling (also cars are often slower than bikes in cities anyway), and when I’m walking or running it keeps changing its mind which it is
It happened again!! With half a week of imported data! Post-import I was checking to make sure nothing got mega-segmented and saw 3 days completely empty. I made a note to investigate in the morning, but the next morning, Arc was all, oh just kidding, we do have data for those days after all!
Wait, what Swarm button in Arc?!
That’s super weird. I wonder if it’s something like the SQLite database being delayed in updating its indexes. Though that’s the sort of thing I imagine up when I can’t find the cause of a bug, and SQLite people will then say it’s absolutely impossible. But… maybe there is something to it 
In the buttons row on the visit details view. If it’s the current visit, the button will be the yellow Swarm icon with “CHECK IN” text. Or if there’s already a checkin associated with the visit then it’ll just be the Swarm icon, and tapping it will take you to the checkin in the Swarm app.
Actually, I wonder if the “CHECK IN” button doesn’t show unless you’ve got your Swarm account connected in Arc’s Settings tab. Ah yep, code says it won’t show it unless there’s Foursquare auth. You can check that in Settings tab → Integrations.
I was actually going to hook it up soon so that you could tap it to log historical visits, not just the current visit - to log checkins for past visits. But now that Foursquare is on the way out, that’s not going to happen
Ahahah I can’t believe I’ve missed that this entire time! It took me awhile to figure out what you were talking about too; I realized it’s because I either check in immediately into a place (i.e. when Arc doesn’t show a location yet because it doesn’t know I’ve stopped) or I completely forget and do it later at which point I’m usually checking into multiple spots at once. (This also made me realize that I’ll likely continue using Swarm because I missed the stats about the last time I was in a place when I was checking in via Arc.)
Anyhoo, all this manual updating made me realize that my 2018 data has been a mess this entire time (or possibly the last time that I switched phones, I never looked back to make sure all the details also transferred over. Who knows at this point!) and that my Moves import never actually made it in. And that there’s about half a year between Moves and Arc where the data is only in Gyroscope. I missed the last poll and it’s probably another one of those that’ll never actually win the forum poll (but at least it wins in the Change Map). But maybe one day after big things like moving away from Foursquare happens? 
Yeah that’s possibly the last remaining thing about Swarm that I still care about, and will miss. I definitely want to make it easier to see that kind of info in Arc. You can always tap through to Place Details then All Visits view, but that’s pretty obscure.
Definitely get that imported then! I actually almost removed the Moves Importer from Arc completely recently. I tend to like to remove very old features like that after some years, because otherwise they can bog down the code and make things complex. I just checked, and thankfully it’s still there! But I haven’t tested it in literally years, so really hope it still works properly. (It should, but yeah it’s been years, so I’m nervous).
Gyroscope import? If it’s a winner on ChangeMap I really should keep putting it in polls on the forum here. Though there’s the question of how many people still care - maybe those ChangeMap votes are old votes from people who’ve stopped caring about their Gyroscope data. But even so…
Aside: The move away from Foursquare should be going live any hour now, as soon as the App Store App Review Team finally approve the build. I’ve had to rush the change out really quickly, because Foursquare are charging Arc over 100 USD a week and not replying to emails. So the first version that’s got Google Places instead of Foursquare is a bit rough - no place category icons, and no buttons to link to the places in Google Maps. I’ll push out another update or two quickly after, to get those bits in too.
But yeah, I’ve really got to do more work on import formats for Arc 
Maybe there should be a release cycle soon that solely focuses on that.
Totally! The pop-up factoid part is fun. Like the whole “you’ve traveled #### miles since your last check-in” or “the last time you checked in was in [date]”. Especially for places in cities I visit every couple of years or airports, or even there are places that I stopped going to during the pandemic where I’m still getting “you haven’t checked in here since 2019” messages!
Eek I’m glad you didn’t! The Moves folder has been in my Arc Import folder this entire time so I’m not sure what happened! I’ll report back whenever I get that imported, but I was gonna wait til I got the current transfer to my new phone cleaned up. I’ll report back. Haha
Yes please!
Ooh nice!! And good to know. But does this mean that all those Swarm icons next to check-ins disappear? Because I find that I’m actually relying on that quite a bit in the data cleanup. (I suppose I could reference Swarm directly but that hurts my head even more!)
YES PLEASE!! I’m still hanging on to MotionX-GPS and probably will for as long as it exists in the App Store. It would be amazing to be able to bring those old trips in, even if it makes for a funky-looking Arc (ie little bits of trips and loads of empty timelines). I also have files from an old Holux from travels before smartphones were a completely crutch- er tool, and I’ve never gotten around to figuring out where to put them for visualization.
Those will still be there! Including the “check in” button, if you’re still using a place that came from Foursquare (thus has a Foursquare place id).
All the Foursquare code is going to remain unchanged, and continuing to function. It’s just that now the place results you see in the Confirm/Edit view will come from Google Places instead of Foursquare. But because those results lists also contain places from your local database (ie any place you’ve assigned visits to before), it will also continue to contain places that initially came from Foursquare.
I’ve changed over some of my visits to the Google Place equivalents, then merged in the Foursquare places. But that’s only to test to make sure that place merging is working correctly, and also general testing to make sure Google Places is actually returning useful results (which it sometimes isn’t - there’s some quirks to work through).
Yeah it’s embarrassing that Arc still doesn’t support import of GPX files, as well as maybe one or two other common standards. It’s one of those things that’s incredibly tedious work to build, and not quick work either, so unless I’m being constantly reminded and berated it slips by the wayside. But it really really has to get done eventually.
Reporting back that the Moves import still works! I think I had it in the Import folder before and got distracted and never checked to make sure it did import. This time it started once I moved the Moves zip into the main folder (and renamed it to remove the date appended to the end. Which did the trick or maybe both, I don’t know).
This is great! I’ve been picking based on whichever service’s location has the most specific icon. I have noticed that Google Places doesn’t populate a list of options reliably. (It’ll just display nothing and maybe if I come back to it after searching for a place and choosing one, it’ll show a list.) My memory is such (combined with going back many years ago to correct data) that I don’t know what the location’s name is to type it in to trigger a search (but if I saw it in a list of options I’d know immediately). Is that one of the Google Places quirks?
Consider this your 8 days later reminder and beratement.
In the first build I shipped using Google Places, I had it not doing a search until you started typing. Which is a bit annoying / dumb. So I sent out another update that does an initial search as soon as you tap on the search bar. So the results will populate immediately, then update again as you type.
Though I’m also noticing that Google’s initial results aren’t as “intelligent” as Foursquare’s used to be, in that the actual correct place is much less likely to be in the initial results list. It’s almost as though Google is trying to show “places nearby but not the actual place we think you’re at”, where as Foursquare was trying to show “the most likely place you’re at right now”. Different goals.
I could be completely wrong on that hunch though. It’s just my intuition on what it feels like it’s doing so far. We’ll no doubt get a better sense of it in time.