--- title: Location and places description: Attaching a place to an event, including room and floor, and exactly what address search sends to the internet. order: 10 --- # Location and places Attaching a place to an event, and what the app does with it. > **Android only for now.** On iOS and web the location sheet reports that search isn't > supported: address search and the map preview aren't available yet on those platforms. --- ## Adding a location Open an event's **Location** option. Type an address and suggestions appear as you go; pick one and the map preview updates. **Done** saves it, and clearing the field removes it. Two fields sit below the address: | Field | For | |---|---| | **Room** | "Meeting Room 3", "Ward B", "Studio 2" | | **Floor** | "4th floor", "Basement", "Mezzanine" | A geocoder can find the building. It cannot know which room you're supposed to be in. Those two fields are yours to fill and are stored alongside the address rather than merged into it. You don't have to search at all: typing a plain label and leaving it works. You just won't get coordinates or a map. --- ## What the suggestions are Address search is powered by **Photon**, an open-source geocoder over OpenStreetMap data. Each suggestion carries a badge saying what kind of place it is (house, street, venue, locality), which is also what sets the map preview's zoom, so a venue opens closer in than a town. The search is deliberately restrained: it waits **350 ms** after you stop typing, needs at least **2 characters**, and shows at most **5 results**. This limits the load on a free shared service. --- ## The home-region bias Address search is biased toward where you schedule things, so typing "the crown" surfaces the one near you rather than one four hundred miles away. Calendite works this out **without ever asking you and without using device location**: 1. **Cold start**: before it knows anything, it guesses a country from your time zone (falling back to your locale) and uses that country's centre. 2. **Learned**: it remembers the coordinates of your last **20** picks and uses their median. It uses a median, not an average, so one trip abroad doesn't drag the bias across a continent. This is a **ranking hint only**. It never excludes results; it only decides what floats to the top. Nothing about it is shared, and it is not your location: it is the middle of the places you've been choosing. --- ## The map preview A small non-interactive map under the address, styled to match the app in light and dark. You can zoom it; it supports no other interaction. Its only job is confirmation: that the address the geocoder matched is the place you meant, which is much easier to see on a map than to read in a string. --- ## Coordinates When you pick a suggestion, the latitude and longitude are stored with the event, not just the text. Nothing uses them today beyond the preview. They're kept because travel-time features ("leave by…") need them, and capturing them from the start means that work needs no migration later. A hand-typed location has no coordinates and no map; it is fully supported. --- ## Inner and variant events Both can override their parent's location, and both use this same sheet with full structured addresses. Leaving a child's location empty means **inherit the parent's**. --- ## Privacy Two things reach third-party servers when you use this feature. Neither is optional while the feature is in use, and neither is mentioned elsewhere in the app: - **What you type into the address field** goes to `photon.komoot.io` to be geocoded as you type, debounced. - **The area you're looking at** goes to `tiles.openfreemap.org`, which serves the map tiles, fonts and icons. This happens even though the map's styling is bundled with the app. Neither request carries your identity, your account (there isn't one) or anything about the event: only the query text or the tile coordinates, with a `Calendite/1.0 (Android)` user agent. If you'd rather not make either request, don't use address search: type a plain label instead. Both endpoints are configurable in one place for anyone self-hosting. See [What leaves your device](/docs/privacy/what-leaves-your-device.html) for the complete picture. --- ## Next - [What leaves your device](/docs/privacy/what-leaves-your-device.html) - [Getting started](/docs/getting-started.html)