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Capture anchors on site

Most Anchor Points are best placed at a desk, from a mapping site. But you can place one by standing at it and letting your phone report where you are, which is the better answer for anything a map does not draw well.

This is called field editing, it happens in the phone app on a Map you own, and it is a side path rather than the main route — most Maps never need it.

When it is worth doing

  • The feature is not on any map. A stage, a bar or a marquee that is put up for the weekend.
  • The map you have is schematic. A piste map or a hand-drawn site plan where the drawn positions are approximate, so reading coordinates off a satellite view gives you the wrong pairing.
  • You are going to be there anyway, and it is quicker to walk to three gates than to identify them from above.

When it is not

  • The feature is a permanent, identifiable thing — a building corner, a junction, a bridge. A mapping site is more precise than a phone standing next to it, and you do not have to travel.
  • You are indoors. A phone’s Position indoors is poor to useless, and an anchor is only as good as the fix it was taken from.
  • You want many anchors quickly. Walking a site is minutes per point.

How to do it

  1. Open the Map in the app — it has to be a Map you own — and enter field editing. The first time, it explains itself: walk the venue and capture geometry from your phone’s GPS.
  2. Tap ＋ New area, then choose the Anchor point card, which is labelled Calibrate the map to GPS.
  3. Walk to the exact spot and stand still for a few seconds. Standing still matters: a phone that has just stopped moving is still catching up.
  4. Read the accuracy the app reports before committing. If it warns of low accuracy, you can still go ahead and override — but a poor fix makes a poor anchor, and one poor anchor is worse than none.
  5. Tap Pin position here to fix where you are, then place that same point on the image so the editor knows which spot on the picture it corresponds to.
  6. Tap Save anchor.

Anchor edits apply straight away, deliberately: they keep the Map calibrated, so they are not held in a draft the way Areas are. That means a bad one is live immediately — check the Calibration Quality figure afterwards.

How accurate it is

A phone outdoors with a clear view of the sky is good to a few metres. That is:

  • Fine for a venue map. A few metres on a festival site is well inside the size of the Areas people care about.
  • Not fine for a small courtyard, or for distinguishing two doors of the same building.
  • Much worse under cover. A metal roof, a tunnel, a dense crowd, a valley wall — all of it degrades the fix, and the app tells you when the fix is poor rather than letting you assume.

So the honest comparison: a desk-derived anchor from a good aerial image is usually more accurate than an on-site one. On-site wins when the thing you are anchoring is not visible from above, or when the image you are calibrating is not to scale.

Mixing the two

Nothing stops you. Place three from the desk, walk out and add two on site, and the fit uses all five. That is often the best of both: the permanent features from above, the temporary layout from the ground.

Areas and floors, on site

The same field editing session can capture Areas of Interest and their floors, and those are held in a draft until you review and submit them — Nothing is posted until you commit. That is a different job with a different page: capture Areas and floors on site.

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