Pin radius vicinity issues

Question

Hi,
This problem below got caught up on another thread with a different problem, thought best to start a new thread for it.
My particular problem here comes from user manipulation via Manage Your Places of the radius of pins. It is slow, it is jerky and it is buggy and what it did some weeks back was jump on one particular pin and expand it to cover the entire world which basically overwrote every other location I had set. Why it would overwrite these without the user changing the settings for said pictures themselves is absolute stupidity, but I digress.
Rebuilding libraries etc. is not going to retract the radius of that circle I am assuming and restore all of the original locations I had. Anyway, I took a deep breath and decided to approach places a little differently and have a lot less specific places. Before I might have had 15 photo locations for a town, now the pics will come under just the town name.
So I have been going through renaming one of the fifteen pins (just from this one town as an example) as the town name, expanding it to cover the area the 15 covered then I delete off the other 14 as places. Time consuming and laborious but I see an eventual sensible outcome from it and in theory quicker to rename all my lost places.
The problem is that the radius issue keeps happening, half a dozen times in the past 3 or 4 days alone and this meant that roughly 2500 pics I had relabelled were once again overwritten with the location of the pin with the expanded radius. And I'm back to square one.
So is there any workaround for this particular Places problem?
Thanks,
C.

Answer 1

@Craig,
I am not sure to what extent less specific places "solves" the problem, which seems to be the radius that a pin receives when placed on the map for the first time.  It seems to be a value determined by Google, is not displayed in the teeny-weeny Assign a Place... dialog, and cannot be modified until it has or has not overlapped other custom places.  So, while the probability of overlap might be somewhat reduced by less specific places, the inconvenience it causes is increased.  I have noticed that Google defines a region named "Aletschgletscher" or "Jungfrau Aletsch" (working from memory here), which has a rather large radius due to the very irregular shape of the glacier, and that pins defined for towns in the Obergoms region, e.g., Blitzingen, Niederwald, Oberwald, Ulrichen, etc., often assumed the very large radius of the Aletsch Glacier.  Besides, I'm wondering why on earth I should have to modify my use of this feature to accommodate Apple's stupid implementation of it.  Nobody in Apple should even consider making the argument that this is how it should work.  The legions of problems it causes is well documented in these forums, although, as we all know, Apple "isn't monitoring" them and hence, presumably, is quite unaware of them.  And iPhoto 09 implemented Places completely differently -- the interface didn't have the eye-candy and "just magical" appeal of the present one, but it didn't cause the problems we're experiencing with Places in iPhoto 11.
My "solution" to the pin radius problem is:
Enter a character string in "Assign a Place..." and see what iPhoto suggests.
If you are tempted to select a suggestion that is a custom place of yours, do so only if you don't intend to modify its location or name.  Doing so will have the same effect as modifying it in Manage My Places!
If you select a place suggested by Google, try to locate it sufficiently far away from other custom places (iPhoto no help here), and give it a name that you can easily recognize and distinguish from Google's suggestions in the future (cf. warning above).
Go directly to Manage My Places, find the new place, judge which existing places it overlaps, and note them down somewhere for the next step.  Then reduce its radius and adjust its location.
Go into the Places view and select the new place.  In all probability there will be photos at that place that don't belong there.  Assign them to the correct place from the list you made in the step above.
Weep and gnash teeth as necessary.  Regularly chant:  "On a Mac it just works!"  Keep stiff upper lip and imagine how much clumsier this must be in Windows.
Regards,
Richard