A scout day turns a shortlist into a running order with times on it: what you are seeing, in what sequence, and roughly when you will be there.
Creating one
- Open a project that has locations in it
- Click Add Scout Day
- Name it and set the date and start time
- Pick the locations to visit
- Drag the stops into the order you want
The day is bookended by your production office, so the route starts and ends there. A lunch break is inserted automatically near the middle of the location list, which you can move, retime, or delete like any other stop.
Stop types
Not every stop is a location from your library:
- Location stops come from the project and carry the address, contact, and photos
- Custom stops are anything else you need on the schedule: a permit office, a meeting, a coffee stop, a place you have not added to the library yet
- Lunch is its own type, with its own icon
- Production office appears at each end
Location and custom stops with coordinates are lettered A, B, C in the order they run, and those letters match the map pins.
Times, and how to pin one
By default the schedule chains forward: start time, then each stop's duration, then the drive to the next, and so on. Change a duration and everything after it shifts.
That falls apart the moment you have an appointment. If the owner will only meet you at 2pm, open that stop and set its arrival time directly. It becomes a fixed anchor: stops before it schedule as normal, and everything after it is measured forward from when you leave it. Before this existed, people used to pad the durations of earlier stops until the maths came out, which worked until someone reordered the day.
Two things to know about pinned times. Reordering the pinned stop itself releases the pin, since a time you chose for the third stop rarely still makes sense at the seventh; dragging other stops around it leaves it alone. And if an edit somewhere else makes a pinned time impossible to reach, the stop gets a warning badge rather than being quietly corrected. That was not your mistake, so the app does not overwrite your choice to hide it.
Drive times
Travel time between stops comes from Google's driving estimates and updates as you reorder. Custom stops without an address get a proportional estimate instead, since there is nothing to route to.
These are estimates without the traffic on the day and without the twenty minutes spent finding the parking. If a day looks tight on paper, it will be tighter in practice.
Getting it out of the app
- Print produces the itinerary as a page with the route map, addresses, and times, which is the version that survives a day with no signal
- Share emails it to your team or attendees, with the map, a Google Maps link for the whole route, and calendar links so recipients can add the day to Google, Outlook, or Apple Calendar themselves
- Attendees can be listed on the day, so the itinerary says who is coming
Practical timings
Rough durations that hold up, for setting stop lengths:
- 15 to 30 minutes to decide whether somewhere is plausible at all
- 45 to 60 minutes for a location you are seriously considering
- An hour or more if you are shooting proper coverage of the place
- Add 30 minutes on top of any stop where a client is meeting you there, because that conversation does not fit in the gap
Leave more slack than the schedule needs. The locations worth finding tend to be the ones you were not looking for, and a day packed to the minute has nowhere to put them.