Favorites en point of interest

[Drabslab]

I have some difficutlies between understanding the difference between favorites and points of interest.

In my (poor?) understanding, favorites are points of interest only relevant to me, while points of interest are favorites of one user or another who have been made accessible for all MRA users because they could be useful by more people. Or, batches of POI have been imported from elsewhere?

Now, if I am totally wrong, please explain me

If not, would it not be a good idea to merge both concepts?

[Hans van de Ven MR.MRA]

@Drabslab said in Favorites en point of interest:

I have some difficutlies between understanding the difference between favorites and points of interest.
In my (poor?) understanding, favorites are points of interest only relevant to me, while points of interest are favorites of one user or another who have been made accessible for all MRA users because they could be useful by more people. Or, batches of POI have been imported from elsewhere?
Now, if I am totally wrong, please explain me

Hello Drabslab,

Favorites are indeed points that you can create yourself in MRA, for example if you have a fixed point to start a route, such as a gas station. These are indeed only available for you.

The POI files are in a database and can be added to a route for eel (gold) users.

But you can also add your own POIs to a route or upload a list of your own POIs.

[Drabslab]

So, I was not that far of the mark.

Now, my motorcycle garage is not amongst the general point of interest "motor winkel/garage" list. Can I add it to the list, or can I only put it in as a personal favorite?

Reason for asking is actually that I stopped last year in a crazy "mexican" pub/restaurant in the middle of France last year. It was a total surprise and actually a perfect spot for lunch on a tour. I would love to be able to mark such nice encounters here for anyone coming in that neighbourhood. it just appears that a message on the forum is a bit inadequate for things like this. Adding it to a poi list, with a nice comment aside i that would be possible, would be much better. Or is there a good way to do this?

[Nick Carthew]

@Drabslab POIs and favourites are similar but not the same. A favourite is just a stored location that you have made that allows you to quickly add a new, known waypoint to your route. By clicking on one of your favourites, the map will automatically centre itself around your favourite and you then have a choice to click the + button to add this position as a new waypoint, this will then become part of your route.

With POIs, you can choose to add them as a POI or add them as a waypoint. Always add them as a POI. A POI will not become part of your route but it will be visible on some GPS devices. This visual onscreen reference of a POI can be useful.

[Hans van de Ven MR.MRA]

@Drabslab

Maybe we can create an POI list per country with the favorit placets of the riders‍️

[Drabslab]

@Hans-van-de-Ven-RouteXpert

That is more or less what I mean. If I could myself "upgrade" a personal favorite to become an MRA poi, adding a few tags such as country or what the favorite is actually about (restaurant, museum, hotel ...) adding a small text explaining why i add it similar to making trips public then everyone could use this, and up or downvote it depending on their experience with it.

[Guzzist]

...there are 2 different points of view: talking about POI in MRA and talking about POI in Navi device.
Different between Favorite and POI in MRA are well explained above: Favorite is only for your own use (kind of data base and can be used as waypoint in your routes. As far i know, it's not downloadable.

POI is also usable as waypoint for your MRA routes, but can me moved together with your route onto your Navi. So you can in your Navi also select just one of that POI as target for navigation - or the whole route as usually.

Also POI can be downloaded as GPX file, to have a Backup, to load onto your Navi or to share with others. This GPX file then will contain only those waypoints, but no route.
If your collection of POI contains for example 10.000 items (may all McDonalds Restaurants) many of Navi devices can't accept the file with more than 50 or 100 POI=waypoints. The trick is, to use website "gpsbabel" to transform this POI GPX file to the file format GPI. In such a format, Garmin Navi will accept also more than 10.000 POI in the file.

[Hans van de Ven MR.MRA]

That is correct.

[Drabslab]

Which brings me back to the starting point

In MRA:

When I enter an interesting place (ex: the parking of the Chateau de Savigny les Beaune aircraft museum) as favorite then I can add it to a route as waypoint but it disappears between all other waypoints
When I enter it as favorite then it gets a beautiful special symbol on my web MRA router page but I can't use it as waypoint for a stop on my route.

As far as I know, I can't share any of these with other MRA users.

With my TomTom Rider:

This thing seems to have a different idea about favorites; I have plenty of them like my home address, the home of some friends, places I visit regularly, but I can't manage syncing these automatically with MRA favorites or selected points of interest.

Hence,would it not be a good idea to merge all this?

[MyRoute-app community]

@Drabslab Thank you for sharing your insights, I'm adding this to The Great Suggestion list as a viable suggestion for an overall POI/Favorites rework. This specific scenario doesn't ring a bell, however, rest assured that at the office we've talked quite a lot about the complexity of having different types of points (POI, Fav, Waypoint, Stop point, etc) and using their behavior to the fullest within Navigation, TomTom, Here and all other navigation devices.

[Guzzist]

@Timo-Martosatiman-MRA
...I can imagine, sharing of WPs, Favorites, POIs, etc. between MRA and Garmin or TomTom can become a nightmare. But in the end, it's a mußt have.

With my route planning in MRA, I love to use POIs (have imported lot of). If I'm lazy and place WPs in the route without text/description - and share this with other people - they may feel this as not fancy. But if I'm using POIs as WP, it will have the text of the POI in the WP automatically, and so the route becomes more informative.
Additionaly, if l transmit this route from MRA into my Navi, I get both: route with embedded WPs and separated POIs. If I decide on the road to leave the route for a while, I'm still able to select later on any of the POIs out of the POI list as next target. If wanted, from that point, I can again follow the route.

But one thing is making me angry. May it's not the fault of MRA, but Garmin396: if route with WPs and/or POIs is transmittet, the Garmin396 uses the WP only for navigation, not as intermediate target (sub target). Means: on screen, I get no Info about distance or time to next WP/intermediate target/sub target. Thats not comfortable for long trips; I love to be inforned about distance to next fuel- or coffee stop etc.
I remember at Garmin Zumo220: with this device it worked as expected well!

Please can you investigate?
And try to use in MRA as many as possible of the allowed amount of attributes (gpxx:City, gpxx:Country) - not only single field for Name of POI.

Thank you

[MyRoute-app community]

@Guzzist

Thank you for providing additional information on this subject. When we look into this specific thread it'll help me write a management summary for discussion.

Regarding the 396: It's very strange that the Zumo220 did work and the 396 doesn't. In general, a new product should have more features. The reasoning behind this is that the complexity of transmitting information as a third party to this device is significantly different from transmitting to other devices. While I can't assign immediate priority to it and would be lying if I said I would, it is important that this is resolved. Thank you for point that out.

[Guzzist]

@Timo-Martosatiman-MRA ...fair enough, nit to talk about resolution time or priority in the beginning

[Drabslab]

@Timo-Martosatiman-MRA said in Favorites en point of interest:

@Drabslab Thank you for sharing your insights, I'm adding this to The Great Suggestion list as a viable suggestion for an overall POI/Favorites rework. This specific scenario doesn't ring a bell, however, rest assured that at the office we've talked quite a lot about the complexity of having different types of points (POI, Fav, Waypoint, Stop point, etc) and using their behavior to the fullest within Navigation, TomTom, Here and all other navigation devices.

In my opinion, a point of interest is nothing but a waypoint stored outside a route and identified by its coordinates, and probably for the sake of human readability, an address, a short title, and a few other standard elements.

In addition, it can have a series of tags allowing to put it into categories the same way as it is common for photos.

Filling in those tags will always have an element of subjectivity. For instance, I may consider my address as “home” while all others mark it as “stay away from there”

A minimum set of tags should be obligatory when entering a poi:

• Public/private: this poi is for personal use only, or, this poi can come on the public list for everyone to see
• General/specific: this tag is always relevant for me (favorite?) or this poi is only relevant for me for this particular trip.
• A type from a limited drop down list (garage, pass, hotel, museum …)
• And personal tags that also may go public (airplanes, excellent, …)

The usual problems with tagging will also apply here: difficult to have a coherent set of tags, and simple enough as not to create a heap of admin for all users.

This should not prevent this point from getting a specific role in a trip such as point of departure, arrival …

[Guzzist]

@Drabslab
I like your suggestion, but currently, I still prefer a "real" sat nav device. Smartphone is today still not 100% equivalent. In consequence, Waypoints, Favorites and POIs of MRA should be most as possible able to correspond with other sat nav devices.

[Drabslab]

@Guzzist said in Favorites en point of interest:

@Drabslab
I like your suggestion, but currently, I still prefer a "real" sat nav device. Smartphone is today still not 100% equivalent. In consequence, Waypoints, Favorites and POIs of MRA should be most as possible able to correspond with other sat nav devices.

@Guzzist

Me too, i would nto dream of using a smartphone on a motorcycle, I have a TomTom rider 400. But that does not prevent upgrading the web interface of MRA, and ensuring that "my" MRA points of interest can be used as waypoints in a route, or are downloaded to my satnav as points of destination