Place assets by hand
Use the crosshair to drop points, lines and areas on the map or the 3D view without walking there. The record marks them as hand-placed.
On this page
Sometimes you can't, or don't need to, stand on the spot: a pole across a busy road, a feature you can see clearly on the imagery, or a sketch of an area. Manual placement lets you put an asset wherever the crosshair is on the map, instead of at your GPS position.
Manually placed assets are clearly marked on the record. They aren't measured positions, and the app never presents them as measured.
Before you start
- An active project.
- An active type. See Choose what to collect.
- For the best results, offline maps or imagery detailed enough to place things on.
Turn on the crosshair
Tap the crosshair button (⌖) on the right of the Survey map's control row. It turns blue, and a crosshair appears in the middle of the map. Tap it again to turn manual placement off.
The crosshair works on the 2D map and in the 3D view. In 3D, the point goes where the crosshair meets the terrain. It isn't available in the list view.
Place a point
- Pan the map until the crosshair is exactly on the spot.
- Tap ⊕.
- The form opens straight away. There's no capture screen, because nothing is being measured. Fill it in and tap Save.
Repeat for each point: pan, tap ⊕, save.
Place a line or an area
- Pan the crosshair to the first vertex and tap ⊕. A vertex is placed, and the draft figure is drawn on the map.
- Pan to the next vertex and tap ⊕ again. Keep going.
- A chip above the controls shows your progress. Tap Finish (lines) or Close (areas) to open the form, then tap Save.
The chip shows:
| Part | What it does |
|---|---|
| Coloured dot and count | The type's colour and the number of vertices placed. |
| Measure | The running length (lines), or area (areas, from 3 vertices). |
| Close-loop switch (◌) | Lines only, once you have 3 or more vertices. When it's on, Finish adds a closing leg back to the first vertex, which is drawn on the map. Useful for a fence that goes all the way round. |
| Undo (↶) | Removes the last vertex. |
| Finish / Close | Available at 2 vertices for a line and 3 for an area. |
What the app records
A hand-placed position is saved with:
- Position source: Manual (map)
- Fix type: manual
- Accuracy: unknown, shown as —. The app doesn't guess one.
- No elevation, and a sample count of 0
Manual positions are exported and reported the same way, so anyone reading the data can tell them apart from measured ones.
If the project has an accuracy gate turned on, a hand-placed position can't be judged, because it has no accuracy estimate. So the gate always warns and never blocks: These positions were placed by hand, so there is no estimate to judge. The record will say they were placed manually. Tap Save anyway to keep it.