Place Merging was added in an update recently!
- Tap on a visit to one of the places you want to merge, then scroll down to “Place details”
- From there, tap the more/ellipsis button, and select “Merge places”
- It will then show you a list of places that overlap the one you’re looking at
- You then get to pick which name you want to keep
This will collate all visits to the places into the single place you chose to keep, and update its stats, location, radius, etc.
You could use the Place Merge view to do this too, if you like. Although personally I like to keep those small places just outside the house, as they do often end up being useful data. For example I keep places like “Home bike rack”, “Condo lobby”, “Hotel reception”, etc. They become useful for things like adding notes, eg “Went down to meet the delivery guy”, “Chatted with reception about late checkout”, etc.
For the short walks being ignored, I suspect if you merge the mailbox place into your home place, the short walks might also get merged in, on the basis that the two places combined create a larger place radius, which should encompass the walks. Though that merging of the walks won’t happen until you navigate to each day’s timeline, as timeline processing like that is only done when viewing the daily timeline views, to defer energy expensive processing until you’re actually looking at the data in question.
For samples recorded inside visits, eg while at home, how the classifier decides to classify those (eg walking or stationary) will be up to what you’ve taught it based on previous confirms/corrects. So if you like to have all data inside the house be classified as stationary, then the classifier will learn that from your edits and do that automatically in future.
There’s a convenient shortcut for that kind of cleanup: the “Clean up segments” button, from the more/ellipsis menu on Item Details view and Edit views.
If you tap that button on a visit, it will offer to convert all the samples to “stationary” (which will then subsequently train the classifier to know that’s how you like them at that place).
If you tap that button on a trip item, it will offer to convert samples to primary type, leaving alone samples that have already been confirmed as some other type. So it’s a quick way of saying “yeah all of this was walking”, when the classifier had already determined that overall the item was walking, but might have classified some short inner segments as something else. Not a necessary step, but sometimes a nice little data housekeeping tool, to tidy things up quickly.
Note that if you do want to preserve some bits of walking inside visits, the classifier will also learn that too, if you explicitly confirm/correct those segments within the visits. So for example if I’m staying in a hotel where the reception area isn’t far enough from the room in terms of horizontal metres, such that having a separate “Hotel reception” place doesn’t really work, I can still use the Split Segment view from the Individual Segments view, to explicitly classify the bits where I walked to and from reception, while still keeping them inside the Hotel visit. And the classifier will learn from that.
That last one can be a bit obsessively over the top, but sometimes I find it useful, depending on the place. Like, it allows me to preserve small details that will later jog memories. Like from the Individual Segments inside the Visit I might be able to observe, “oh I remember I walked down to pick up a delivery, so it must’ve been at 3:20pm, because there’s a brief walking segment shown there”.
