Locandis lets you import lists of places you’ve been to, and pins them for you automatically. So if you keep a spreadsheet, or if you succeed in extracting them from Tripadvisor, you just have to make sure your data is in the right format, and you’re good to go.
Preparing your data
Locandis will accept comma-separated files with four columns:
- continent
- country
- city
- administrative division
It’s better if you don’t include a header row (with the column names), because Locandis will try to match that as well—but it’s not a big deal if it’s there. The accepted file extensions are .csv and .txt. The system will also accept tab-separated data, or even those pesky semicolon-separated files exported by Italian spreadsheets.
The continent name isn’t super important, but since Tripadvisor includes it in its tables, we decided to keep it. It can be an empty column.
Because Locandis uses data from geonames.org, the country and city names can be in different languages, and it will still be able to match them, in most cases.
For the time being, the focus of Locandis is on populated places, such as cities, so it will probably not match places like parks and other landmarks, if they’re included in your data file.
The administrative division is the tricky part, especially if your data comes from Tripadvisor, because Tripadvisor is very inconsistent in how it treats it (sometimes it doesn’t even list it), also because of different standards of use. However, Locandis will try to match whatever is in the fourth column of your file with either a first- or a second-level administrative division. For example, it will match a state in the United States but a province in Italy, but it can also match a region in Italy and will definitely try its best to match a county in the United States.
Uploading your data
Once you upload your data file, it will be processed immediately, but Locandis will keep it stored for a few hours, in case something goes wrong.
You can choose to do a test run on the first twenty records in your data file, by choosing “Import sample,” just to verify that everything goes smoothly. After that, you can simply choose the file you’ve already uploaded, and have Locandis process it completely. Places it has already matched and pinned won’t be pinned again.
Dealing with orphans
If Locandis is not able to recognize some of the entries in your file, it will store them as orphans. You will then be prompted to review and match them manually.