School POI Icons

[Tim25]

Prior to getting my 825 map, school pois seemed to be in the custom POIs under "change preferences". They had "school house" icon...and if you edited it...it would only show up under general POIs for Colleges/Universities with its own icon..whether or not it was a college.

With 825, I still had the custom school POIs, but now there was a new general POI for "school" with an icon showing 2 little kids....This set of general POIs tended to have less detail (abbreviated names / no phone numbers). For many schools, there was no both a custom School and a general School POI.

I started editing/consolidating some schools by deleting the less detailed general school and then changing the custom school category to the general school category. This reduced the clutter, but it all came back with all the duplicates when I moved to the 830 map.

Does anybody know where TomTom is really going with the school POIs. This seems like it needs to be cleaned up, but if they are going to reset with every map upgrade, I'm not going to bother.

 

[sageuvagony]

After upgrading to map 815, I saw that the school categories were changed/moved/removed and could no longer find my school (technical school) or any of my nearby schools. I even tried doing "search POI" by name so it can look through EVERY category, and said "No POI FOUND!!!" I couldn't even find my high school anymore. I emailed TomTom last year about it, and their solution was to remove my new map and to restore an old backup of my old map. What the heck!?!? I'll see if I could dig up the email.


Edit: Found the email.

Response (ST Rebecca F) 11/17/2008 04:28 PM
Dear Richard,

Thank you for taking the time to contact TomTom Support regarding the missing School POI's on the newer map. We are always happy to help.

Upon reading your e-mail, we do apologize that the POI's are missing on the map. We do understand that this can be quite frustrating.

When you downloaded the new map, the first instruction was to make a back up of your old map. If this was done, it is possible to go into the Home software and restore your old map. You can also copy your own POI categories to your computer using Home. Down below, we have included a link that will show you how copy your own entered POI categories to your PC, and then restore them on a new map.

http:www.tomtom.com/6595

If you have any further questions or comments, please e-mail or call us at 866-486-6866 Monday through Friday, 8:30 AM until 7:00 PM EST. Thanks again for writing. At TomTom we believe in showing you the way the easy way.

With Best Regards,

Becki
TomTom Customer Support

The first solution does help with my problem, but why should I have to go back to an old map? The second solution doesn't help me at all since you can only backup POI categories that YOU have entered, not TomTom's POIs. This applies to both the 720 and 920 POI databases.

 

[Malouff]

sageuvagony I am surprised that Becki from TomTom support answered your question like that.
In my case she has been the most knowledgeable person in support I have encountered.

As I understand the schools are encrypted in the POI.dat by TomTom much like the Shop.ov2 from them also is encrypted.
So I know of no way to decrypt these so there is no way to mass convert anything to your own custom POI category.

The only thing you could do when you roll back your map is to create a category and manually copy each and every school's POI to that category (very time consuming)

Another thing you could do is if you have a SD Memory card you can run the two maps and any time you need to find a school switch maps.

If I were you I would also tell TomTom that you will not be updating a map subscription until either they schools are added back to the map downloaded or offered as a download through home that you can add later.

 

[mvl]

I never paid attention to schools in the prior maps, but I can tell you in the latest map (using the full 9xx series POI files):

- There is a school category (icon with running kids), that shows high school and elementary schools.
- There is a separate college category (icon with the square graduation cap), that has colleges and universities

I was also surprised at first when I couldn't find a college in the "school" category.

The North America 2gb map is missing a lot of POIs, there are a few threads posting the full POIs from the North America map from the 9xx series. In my experience, the 9xx series maps have every university I've looked for.

Alternatively, check out if the university is in a 140/340 in Best Buy. If so, you can buy that device's USA_and_Canada_and_Mexico's map in the tomtom map store if you have a 720 (and then get a subscription for it). That map appears to have the full POI files from the 9xx series as well.

For the OP with the ONE/XL, the POIs in the USA_and_Canada map are lacking, and Tomtom doesn't offer a way to upgrade to the full file (just a one-by-one download from 3rd parties in HOME). If that is very important to you, you may want to look at replacing your model with the current XL 340. In my opinion IQroutes alone is worth the price of an upgrade.

 

[Malouff]

sageuvagony,

Maybe Becki from TomTom Customer Support needs an apology.

Looking at a old backup of my original 730 I found a OV2 named School.ov2
It has the following icon created for it

It is also a encrypted file so TomTom must have created it.

To save this forum bandwidth I am not attaching it to this post put instead posting a MediaFire link where you can download it from.

It is a zip named School and in it is your OV2 and BMP both named School

http://www.mediafire.com/file/imncnnzgm3y/School.zip

 

[dhn]

As I recollect (this is a couple of years ago, almost) the then current map for the 720 did not have four categories included in the poi.dat file (didn't get compressed in time for inclusion). Think they were: schools, fire halls, churches and one other. So, TT included these as custom ov2 files within the map download.

 

[Ricochet]

Yeah, what DHN said.

Every time I get a new map, I have to contend with doubled School icons, which are coincidentally in the wrong locations for my town. So one set gets repositioned & the other ones deleted.

I grabbed the separate OV2's a long time back, and now they keep getting reset with each update.