Tuesday, October 11, 2011

To rename Google Map starred landmarks

If you use Google Maps on Android, you may have seen that you can mark new POIs (by tapping and holding a location, and starring it), but there is no obvious way to rename the marked location - it takes the name as whichever address Google could look up for that place. It cannot be done even on Google Maps on the Internet.


It also appears that customers have been requesting Google for this feature, and it hasn't been added for a long time. Chances are that Google will one day add this feature - though at this moment it seems the engineers in Google are busy with implementing other features that they find motivating and challenging.

Well, there is an obscure but moderately easy way to help you change the name. The trick lies in another service provided by Google, called Bookmarks. If you open Google Bookmarks, it will show all your starred locations. You can then from there click the edit link to rename a location, it will be immediately updated, and shown next time you use Maps either on your phone or online!

If you have never done this before, you would find this feature nifty because even though Android maps does not show the starred locations by the name you have given, you will be able to search quickly by these names in the map!

11 comments:

  1. Thanks very much for the solution! Works perfectly. It's really useful to be able to name your starred location, particularly when you're in a place which doesn't have street names, but where you use landmarks instead.

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  2. Absolutely brilliant! No more scratching my head wondering what is at a starred location. Thanks a million ;-)

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  3. I just hope that Google will make this an integrated feature in Maps someday.

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  4. Good solution. I wonder whether google programmers use google services or use other products like apple?!!!

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  5. Thank you very much!!!!!

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  6. Fantastic!!! I spent many a time wondering why an address was important to me. Now, no more wondering :) !!!

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  7. Unfortunately, the latest version of Google Maps on Android no longer shows those user-defined names. =(

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  8. I knew that they have stopped allowing us to search for a named place long ago, but I did not know you cannot even show the names at all now. That is unfortunate indeed. I continue to use the functional release that they came up with last - which is v 6.8.0. Next version onwards they screwed this feature up. Granted this is not a sustainable solution - but hey it works - and I will continue using this as long it works.

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  9. this is very helpful, but I find myself working with another shortcoming that should be a basic feature. Let me give you a scenario to help it make sense. I'm looking to move to a different town, so I am looking at potential employers offices, apartment listings, and general attractions. I want to be able to drop a pin for each of them so i can visually tell 'oh ok this job would be close if I lived at X' - something like that.
    The tip you mentioned above does work pretty well but when you 'create a map' the functionality is lost. places starred/saved into that file do not ever get updated with the bookmark names.'

    Im not a computer scientist, but it seems like all the major pieces to this puzzles are there and google is just FAILing to put them together :(
    i guess they're too busy eating free snacks, getting massages, and spending their 20% time on other things to actually make Google Maps work like you might reasonably expect it should in 2013.
    and don't say, 'but don't complain, it's free'. yeah ok google mined the crap out of me and makes plenty. I've paid my dues.

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  10. Brillant !!! Thank you very much. This is so easy.
    I wanted to do this for a very long Time !!

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  11. Thanks for the useful post, although your Google Bookmarks link is broken!

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