How does Calendar determine the starting location?

Question

How does Calendar determine the starting location?

I understand that

Calendar finds your starting location by using the location in any events that are up to 3 hours before this event. If Calendar doesn’t find a location, it uses your work address or home address (from your card in the Contacts app), depending on the time of day.

Apparently calendar also uses shared calendars, even when they are not visible.

For example, we have a shared calendar for our kids' work schedules. My son adds his work shift, with its location. When I go to add an appointment at a time when he is at work, the only start location offered is his work location.

Is there any workaround for this?

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

iMac 24″, macOS 14.7

Posted on Oct 17, 2024 12:43 PM

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Answer 1

Oct 19, 2024 6:18 AM in response to Johann Caauwe

Calendar on your Mac seems to consider any shared calendar as your own calendar for the purposes of travel time. I have been playing around with it after I read your question; I've not really used travel time much so I have learned a bit about it.

Further, it also seems to give the travel time from the location of the previous recent event with a location regardless of which family member created the event, or to which family member the calendar belongs - the "owner" being the one publishing or sharing the calendar to the group.

As you have noted with your example, this isn't especially helpful but I don't imagine that there is any easy way to do this otherwise.

This leaves us with one alternative, which is to estimate the travel time and choose one of the periods offered - or the field called 'Custom' and set your own number of minutes or hours. However this, and I guess any travel time, is relevant only to the group member actually doing the travelling so perhaps it might also be helpful to add the name in the event's title or notes.

I've also noticed that Calendar in iOS is a bit more capable in that it has the ability to set a starting point for the journey, which I don't see being offered in the Mac Calendar app.

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