How does the Location Function Work?
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Recently I noticed some locations that appear to be user-entered. For example, one is titled “Down the Street”, refering to my town’s CBD. It’s a local saying, “I’m going down the street to buy some groceries”, that sort of thing.
As I didn’t create it via the Edit Location feature, someone else must have. And if so, how do they do it?
And today, I was at the optomotrist for an eye test. When I went to add the location for the appointment all it would allow me to enter was a local Chinese restaurant called “Oriental Jade”. In the list of nearby locations there was no entry for the optometrist. In fact, when looking at the map, very few of the businesses were shown.
I tried something. I moved the pin to a business called “Umart” and told Dayone to use that location, but it still saw it as “Oriental Jade”. In fact, it didn’t matter where I placed the pin on that street it still came up with the restaurant.I’m wondering – how do locations get entered into the Maps function of Day One?
I tried to upload a couple of screen grabs of Dayone but this site doesn’t allow me to do that.
Thanks
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That’s a common issue with Day One since it fetches location data from external APIs like Mapbox and Foursquare, which often defaults to the nearest prominent tagged venue when a specific spot isn’t indexed. It actually reminds me of a similar mapping glitch we encountered while mapping supply routes for a freight forwarder in pakistan, where outdated address tags caused pins to shift to nearby places. Try checking or tagging the optometrist on Foursquare directly, as Day One usually syncs its database from there over time.
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As I don’t have a Foursquare account I’ll have to sign up, I guess and to test it.
But, the issue still remains. Note that I’m testing this as I type this entry using the Mac version. I just tried it on the iPhone with the same result.
I typed in “optometrist” and got a list of them as far away as Melbourne, our state’s capital. -
The plot thickens.
I went searching for Foursquare. found that it’s a business service, not a “log in” for users to share their coffee dates. The app for that is called “Swarm” so I have installed it.
I made my first entry. I typed in “optometrist” and Swarm found it. So, it does exist in the 4Square database, but Dayone’s map isn’t showing it.Back to the drawing board, I guess.
Ps. it’s not just about my eye test, it’s about a lot of places which aren’t listed or shown on the map and if I tap on a spot Joe’s Diner is, it invariably tags that as Bill’s Bike Shop which may be a 100m away, or across the road or around the corner.
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Hi @marts57
Day One’s map search pulls place names and nearby points of interest from Apple Maps and Foursquare, not from a database Day One builds itself. That explains the name “Down the Street”: it is coming from one of those two sources for your area, not something entered inside Day One.
It also explains why the optometrist did not show up and why “Oriental Jade” kept showing even after you moved the pin. Day One is showing whatever Apple Maps or Foursquare returns for that spot. When the exact business is not in their data, or the closest listed business does not update as you move the pin, you get a different or more distant result, sometimes in another city entirely.
The team is aware this happens and is working on improving how nearby places get matched and ranked. I do not have a timeline for that work.
For now, you can correct a wrong or missing business listing directly with the source:
For Apple Maps: on iPhone, open Maps, tap your profile picture, then Reports, then Report a New Issue. On Mac, open Maps, then use the Maps menu and choose Report an Issue.
For Foursquare: since you already confirmed the optometrist exists in their database through Swarm, you can submit a request through Foursquare Support to have it picked up.
Either correction should flow through to Day One the next time it searches that location.
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Hi
Thanks for geting back to me on this.
Regards the Apple Maps reporting thing, it doesn’t have an option to report that the Optometrist business doesn’t exist on the map, but it is in its database as I can edit its hours, website or whatever, which I don’t want to do, obviously.
Is there an option to pull data from Google Maps? It shows a more accurate map and is generally better here in Australia than Apple Maps.
As for 4 Square, I used the “Swarm” app the other day at another person’s recommendation, but the optometrist was already in my list of visited places, but not showing up in the Dayone Map.
Anyway, the optmetrist is just one of many places that I can’t drill down to when adding a location for a journal entry. I’m usually just pointing it to the nearest place and renaming it in the app.Cheers
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Thanks.
I wonder, would it be possible to add locations directly to the app’s database itself rather than relying on Maps to do the job?
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You can add your own places to Day One instead of relying on what Apple Maps knows about, with Named Locations. A name you give a spot is saved to your Day One account and syncs between your iPhone and Mac. It also shows up in the location list for any future entry made near that spot.
On iPhone:
- Open the entry, tap the map, then tap the location and choose Edit Location.
- Long-press the map exactly where the optometrist is, then select that marked location.
- Tap the location again and choose Add custom place name.
- Type a name such as “Optometrist” and tap Save.
On Mac:
- Click the location at the bottom of the entry, then click Change Location.
- On the map, right-click exactly where the optometrist is and choose Use Location.
- Click the location at the bottom of the entry again and choose Name This Location.
- Type a name and click Save.
Next time you’re there, start typing the name in the location search. Your saved place appears under Found in My Journal. The name also applies automatically to any entry recorded within roughly 40 metres of that spot. More detail is here: https://dayoneapp.com/guides/tips-and-tutorials/saved-named-locations/
One correction to our earlier reply: on iPhone and Mac, Day One gets place names from Apple Maps only, not Foursquare. That’s why adding the optometrist through Swarm didn’t change anything in Day One.
Two other things that may help:
- On iPhone, Settings > Location History has an option called Auto-apply Point of Interest. When it’s on, dropping a pin picks the nearest business Apple Maps knows about. That’s likely why you kept getting “Oriental Jade”. With it off, the pin uses the street address instead, which you can then name yourself.
- If “Down the Street” appears in your Places list (tap the magnifying glass, then Places), it’s a named location saved on your account. You can rename or delete it from there.
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@marts57 while by default Day One tries to find the nearest point of interest, it is possible to disable it, in that case it will show an address, unless you have for example renamed your address as “Home” then it will show that.
In settings -> location history on iOS you can toggle AUto-insert Place name as title and Auto-apply Point of interest.
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Hi and thanks for the additional help. It’s appreciated.
That auto-apply setting is already disabled. I thought that it was an iOS setting in Location Services so I took ages to try and find it. Maybe they meant that it’s in Dayone Settings and yep, there it was.
Thanks again.
However, I still cannot work out why entries such as “down the street” (mentioned in a previous post), are in my list of places when I’ve never used that. Another one that I saw recently was “on the bus to Morwell”. I don’t use the local bus service, so that one was a mystery as well.
That’s why I asked if they were in 4 Square/Swarm. -
When you add a location, Day One shows two kinds of results:
- Nearby and Search Results come from Apple Maps.
- Nearby Locations in My Journal and Found in My Journal are place names saved in your own entries.
You’ve been journaling with Day One for a long time. The original version of the app picked place names from Foursquare’s list of venues, and that list included plenty of names Foursquare users made up themselves, like “on the bus to Morwell”. If one of those was the closest match when you wrote an entry back then, it was saved with that entry and has stayed with it ever since. Day One now lists it as a place from your journal whenever you’re nearby.
To find the entry, open the Map view in Day One and look around the area the name refers to. Once you’ve found it, you can change that entry’s location to something more accurate if you like.
