Hello,
I’m not sure if this has been brought up. Checking a store I was just at, there are various icons typing such as what seem to be person, pin/place, and perhaps a storefront. At least one is Foursquare and some others have no source listed. At least one had an address range while others the correct address.
I’d guess the building icon is the correct place. I forgot if there was any way to select all of one place and merge to another.
Found the merge. I forgot what are the options in the menu that includes Mapbox. I’ll check around. Maybe that could be simpler or more clear or I forgot if there’s a preference.
For places you’ve been to some time back in Arc’s history, it’s very the source was Foursquare. Newer places (within the past year) will have come from either Mapbox or Google Places.
All of them can be merged, if you’ve used multiple different ones for the same place, and want to tidy them up. Glad to hear you found the Place Merge feature!
The street addresses shown for each place are taken from Apple’s addresses lookup service, rather than from the original places source (ie not from Foursquare, Mapbox, or Google Places). This allows me to use a single consistent service for getting street addresses.
Although I’m tempted to experiment with using the street address info from the place providers, in the hope that it will be more accurate. But in many cases in the past, unfortunately it hasn’t been, or have varying qualities of formatting and detail. At least using Apple’s auto address lookup for that gives consistency in formatting.
For the icons, those again are a hodgepodge of sources. Foursquare did provide icons, but they were of low quality and didn’t match well with Arc’s design. Mapbox also provide icons for a subset of their places, which Arc does use when available, because they’re close enough to Arc’s design style. I think Google Places do provide a very limited range of place icons, but if I remember right, they were so limited as to be next to useless. So for places from Google, Arc maps the category names to Arc’s own icons, same as it did with Foursquare places.
Heh. Basically place databases, place metadata, and place icons are a messy vortex of confusion! Over the years it’s devolved into a situation where there’s no single reliable source, so the resulting hodgepodge is what we get. Arc tries to make the best of what it can, but yeah, sometimes it doesn’t come out in the most ideal way!
One thing I do have on my todos though is to at least show in the place results lists the source of each place, to make it a bit easier to disambiguate. Ideally it shouldn’t matter where it came from, but in practice it does tend to matter quite often.
Oh I forgot one other detail: If the place is shown in bold text in the results list, that means you’ve been there before / used it before for a visit. It means that the “visits count” for that place is greater than zero, so there’s at least one visit in Arc’s database that’s been assigned to that place.
That’s just a quick way of visually distinguishing between “the place entry I used the last time I visited here” versus “some other place entry that’s come from a different source, that I haven’t used before”.
Thanks Matt for the explanation.
Seems like I have a mix of various location sources. I noticed I’m not able to merge some locations, perhaps they’re older ones such as Foursquare. In such cases, when I try to merge, some locations do not show up. I’m not sure what is ideal for such, if I want to mass edit a location to use a newer source or merge. Maybe such will improve later.
I think from memory the Place Merge view will only show places that overlap. So if the duplicate place’s radius is just slightly away from the other place’s radius, it won’t be in the list.
That restriction is there basically just to stop us from accidentally merging the wrong places. Because once a merge is done, it can’t be undone. So an accidental tap on the wrong place could make quite a mess!
Perhaps then there could be a greater radius for merging if the names match? From what I recall, locations can be the same from difference sources but the distance can vary I think up to over 100 feet, such as for large stores.
Yeah that sounds fair and sensible. I’ll make a note to try that!