For some reason, a custom saved place of mine - my parents house I have tons of visits to called “Mom & Dad’s” - is no longer showing up as a selectable place (let alone auto-recognizing). I can’t select it or search for it when trying to categorize my day, but I can search for and find it just fine in the main places search.
I don’t want to create a “new” saved place (especially before Merge Places is in AT4). Is this a bug? What would you recommend I do?
Thank you!
Hi @grayedog!
That’s a curious situation you describe.
My initial suspicion is that somehow the place has “moved” far from where it should be, and enough that its calculated centre is now far enough away that the place results list filters it out as not appropriate.
The place “moving” like that can happen if one or more visits are incorrectly assigned to it and confirmed. Like if some visit 10 kilometres away is assigned and confirmed, the place then updates and its centre moves far off where it should be, to accommodate that incorrect visit.
This actually sounds quite similar to the situation in this thread: Private place no longer shows up in search
So the things to try that I mention in there will be relevant here too.
And yeah, agree, making a new place to work around this would feel like giving in. The appropriate thing to do is figure out why it’s happening and getting it fixed, whether that means fixing some incorrect assignments or hunting out a new bug in the app.
I took a look at that article - it seems to be a different issue than that person was having, as the locations are identical - my parents house is in the suburbs, so it’s very easy to identify and there’s little risk of choosing the “wrong” place.
The location on my visit from yesterday (that I can’t assign) is the exact same house as the most recent visit that was properly assigned (from April 12, 2026). Interestingly, on the older visit (that is assigned right), if I click the place name to edit it, “Mom & Dad’s” doesn’t appear in the list – it’s as if the old ones assigned have “stayed”, but the place itself has vanished! But I can still go to “place details” and see that I have 215 visits over the last 12+ years.
Thoughts/next steps?
The steps will be the same as described in the other thread. Though we can first check to confirm the situation.
Have a look at that previous visit in timeline view, so that you can see the visit details with the map details filled in. Look for the orange circle on the map. That orange circle indicates the calculated centre and radius of the place. Most likely you will see something like a very large orange circle, that’s centred far away from where it should be.
If that’s what you see, then yeah we’ll have to go through the same steps. Tap through to the place details view, then through to Total Visits. Scroll down that list slowly, so that each page pauses and the map updates, showing you the visit circles on the map. That will let you spot any incorrect assignments, and tap through to fix them.
If you get through that list and there’s definitely no incorrect assignments, then possibly the place needs a stats update to snap it out of some incorrect values. To do that, change the place assignment for one of its visits, then (if possible) assign it back to correct again. That will queue it up for update.
From there you can go into the settings view (top left button), then Debug Info → Task Queues → Places pending update, and tap on the place there to trigger an immediate update.
That should result in it fixing itself up, all back to sanity! Though if not… we can keep digging.
I’m trying to follow your instructions, but on both my most recent visit (and even going on the “Place Details” view and clicking to see all my visits), there is no orange circle – only purple circles, all centrally located exactly where they should be on top of my parents’ house. I scrolled all the way down to the very beginning, and while sometimes the purple circle got bigger, (1) it was always centered on their house, and (2) it was never beyond their small neighborhood.
On your recommendation to change the assignment and assign it back, I’m nervous to try – if I go to Edit the location (unlike with all my other selected locations) I don’t see the place name listed to select from. If you still think I should try it, is your recommendation that I try it with a previously-assigned location (that shows the correct location) or with the most recent visit this past weekend (which is currently still showing “Unknown Place” since I can’t properly assign it)? I’m fairly confident neither one will allow me to select it but I’m happy to try it if you still think that will be the right next step.
FWIW I also looked up Models Pending Update in the Debug Info and none of the 3 coordinates listed are where my parents’ house is. Not sure if that’s helpful but figured I’d share.
Thank you!
Ah it sounds like the place circle is either so large that you can’t see the edges, or far enough away that it’s not visible without zooming out. Try swiping the content sheet down (so you can interact with the map more easily) then zoom the map out until you can see the orange circle. It’s likely to be centred some kilometres away.
Ah that’s the other one. The one you want is “Places pending update”.
The goal with this one is to get your “Mom & Dad’s” place queued for update. So you’ll want to be editing a visit that has that place assigned (any of those visits will do). The first edit will get that place queued for update, so even if it’s not available in the list to assign back afterwards, that’s ok.
Once it’s queued for update you can go into “Places pending update”, tap on it there, and it’ll then update to correct centre and radius. And then it’ll properly appear in the places list, for correcting that visit back to the correct place assignment.
Let me know how you get on!
To your first point on the orange circle, I’m fairly confident there is no orange circle. I have swiped down, I’ve zoomed out, etc. - and I’ve scrolled down through the entire Place Details → Total Visit view (where the purple dots change based on which places are show in the scroll) and at no point do I see an orange circle.
Regardless, I went to the most recent visit that was logged there (Apr 12) and changed the “Mom & Dad’s” to the closest saved place I had (Chase Bank, which was about 0.6 miles away) for now. In Task Queues I see “Places pending update” was “2” (Mom & Dad’s and Chase Bank). I tapped on “Mom & Dad’s” and it looked like it spun briefly and then removed from the list.
But after going back to my places list (both the Apr 12 date I tested by changing as well as this past weekend’s date that is still Unknown Location), I still can’t see or select “Mom & Dad’s”.
There will be somewhere. Places have a minimum possible radius of 8 metres (and maximum of 2 kilometres). You might need to zoom out further to see the edges of the circle, if it’s a very large one. Or if it’s very far away, zoom out further to see where it’s landed.
If the workaround of triggering an update didn’t work, then it will mean there’s still an incorrectly assigned visit somewhere.
Once you’ve found where the orange circle has landed, that gives us a useful pointer. Whichever direction it’s centred in, that’s the direction the incorrectly assigned visit is pulling from. So when you go back to Place Details → Total Visits to scroll through again, you’ll have something specific to look for: a visit somewhere off in that direction.
The trick is to pause at each page scrolled, so that the map has enough time to update to show you all the visits in that portion of the list.
Alright, I did find one day with some weird location data back in 2017 - including a “Mom.& Dad’s” somewhere outside Cleveland (I live in Chicago)! (No orange circle, but this still seems related). Tthere’s actually a second similarly “wrong” data point (this one in Pennsylvania) on that same day (with a different label). The movements to/from these spots are right, so I’m not sure how the GPS ended up so wrong.
How do I proceed, can I manually change the GPS location data, do I just mark the Stationary visit as “Bogus”, or something else?
Marking the troublesome segments or samples as bogus is the right trick, yep.
So in the Individual Segments view for a troublesome visit, if there’s already a segment that exactly matches the bad data, then you can tap on that and change that one to Bogus.
But if the bad bit is mixed in with genuine correct stationary data too, you’ll need to go through segment splitting, otherwise you’ll be classifying a whole chunk of valid data as bogus too, which would be undesirable (teaches the classifier models the wrong thing, which they might then repeat later).
Most often bad location data arrives in only very small clusters. Only a few samples over some seconds or minutes, jumping off somewhere random. Oh aside: Arc Timeline 4 has much better handling of that kind of situation, filtering it out intelligently itself. So this is going to be something you’ll see far more rarely from here on. Old data from the old app rather than new data in the new app.
For the instructions on how to work through this, I think best I hand over to Claude. My attempt at explaining it was a rambling mess! Claude will write it up much more clearly. Ok, over to Claude:
Thanks Matt. Here’s the step by step:
If the bad data already sits in its own segment (its own row in the list):
If the bad data is mixed in with good stationary data, you’ll want to isolate it first — which takes two splits.
First split, to mark the start of the bad data:
) to fine-tune it sample by sample. The map updates as you go — so you can watch exactly which points fall on each side.Second split, to mark the end of the bad data:
That isolates the bad data and marks just the bad part as bogus. It then drops out of all the calculations — centre, radius, the lot — so the place will settle back to where it should be and reappear in the selectable place list.
Back to Matt: Ok yep, that all reads sensible to me! Claude’s written up much clearer instructions than my earlier effort resulted in. Anyway, let us know how you get on! It’s a bit of a fiddly process, even if you’re already familiar with it.
It worked! I was skeptical through it all - but once I fixed the wonky locations (I did end up splitting them so I kept the first or last segment where it belonged and made the nonsense cross-country travel Bogus), changed one more “properly” assigned location, found it in the queue, and tapped it…
…it was now there for me to go back and update the ones I’d changed and the ones I couldn’t set.
Appreciate all the help here – and I think I have a few more of these I’ll need to find the time to fix (now that I know how)!
Phew! Glad that got it in the end 
Yeah when I’ve got spare time I occasionally browse back to random days in past years, to see if there’s anything worth cleaning up. It’s sometimes satisfying work.
Older iPhones and older iOS versions created messier, noisier data. So the older data tends to stand out as more “ew” than the newer stuff we’re getting now.