Issues with Tracker weaving points resulting in braided track lines

Question

Hello Everyone!

Our organization uses Tracker to visualize where field work has been done and what areas of our properties were visited when out in the field. Recently, the tracks that are being captured are coming out strange. There are unique session IDs that prevent tracks from overlapping and getting confused with each other, yet the tracks themselves are braiding/weaving themselves together instead of following the time stamps to create the proper track lines. I have tried using the Point to Line tool (to convert the track points to lines manually) and it too provides an output line that is woven together instead of following the correct, linear path.

Looking to see if anyone else has struggled with this issue and if there are solutions readily available. Images attached below to show the 'weaving' happening. I have tried everything to remedy this with no solution so far. In green you can see the points and when I follow the time stamps on the points, they go in chronological order and do not weave.

Thanks in advance!

ColinLawrence · Answer

A couple of things to clarify:

>  there is one Tracks layer for all field accounts (4 separate field accounts feed into one singular tracks layer -  not ideal, but the way our org works..

Track Views can be created with the Track Viewer app. You can create individual Views for each user or group them as you please. It wasnt clear if you were aware of this.

>The blue lines you see weaving above are the original "Track Lines" that come directly from the Tracker layers.

The "Track Lines" layer is generated server side after the track points are uploaded. The track "lines" you see in the Field Maps app, which appear in the Layers tool as the My tracks layer, are not necessarily the same lines you may see in the Track Lines layer on when reviewing in a Web Map after upload. This is part of the reason I was asking how the lines appeared on the mobile device for the My tracks layer. By this time those original points are likely gone from the device. However, if you did see the lines drawing like this in the Field Maps app as a part of the My tracks layer it may indicate an issue with the GPS signal but that also seems unlikely based on your screenshot.

Have you stepped through the original track points, while observing the timestamps? Do they seem to follow along the path in the correct order?

EGallant15 · Answer

Hi Colin,

A couple tricky parts to this - the tracks within this layer are recorded from various devices, depending on who is in the field that day. Some use our field iPad, others use their personal phones - both iPhones and Androids. The second tricky part is that there is one Tracks layer for all field accounts (4 separate field accounts feed into one singular tracks layer -  not ideal, but the way our org works..). There are however unique user IDs for each account, and a session ID that separates the tracks. The weaving seems to happen regardless of the account. I have never had issues with weaving this extensive until this year. Occasionally I would receive one braided track, but this time it looked as if almost every track taken had this braiding issue.

Yes - the original tracks look like this. The blue lines you see weaving above are the original "Track Lines" that come directly from the Tracker layers.

Any further questions you may have - please let me know!

Thanks!

Eleanor

ColinLawrence · Answer

Hi @EGallant15 ,

What do the tracks look like on the device, if they have not been cleared already? And what device was used to capture them? Just for clarification, are all of these tracks coming from the same user and same device?