Short answer
Photograph the street's name sign in the field — that gives you a point asset on the map at the sign's location. On the web app, convert that point into a line that traces the street. The line becomes the asset for street-level work (litter-picking, weed control, leaf clearance), without needing to walk the whole street to capture it.
Detail
Litter-picking and other street-level work doesn't have a natural single-point "thing" — it covers the whole length of a road. The cleanest model is one line asset per street, with the street name as the asset name.
The capture trick:
- Photograph the street name sign at one end of the street, with location tagging on (see How do I set up a phone so its photos carry the GPS location for asset capture?). This gives you a point asset where the sign is.
- On the web app, open the asset and switch its geometry from point to line.
- Draw the line along the road's path on the map.
- Name it with the street name (the photo of the sign acts as a useful visual record on the asset card).
- Tag the location with the area or estate the street belongs to.
The asset is now a line representing the whole street. A litter-picking routine can target a batch of these line assets at once.
Watch-outs
- Lines are for things that genuinely have linear extent — streets, paths, perimeter walls, fences. Don't use lines for things that are really points (a bin, a bench, a tree) or really polygons (a play area, a verge). Civic.ly's leaderboard treats LineString geometries on point-like assets as a data-quality signal of user error.
- Long lines fragment less well into per-asset jobs. A 1km street as one line means one job per cycle for the whole street; if you want to track per-section completion (e.g. "the operative did the north end this morning"), consider splitting into named segments.
- The street-sign-photo trick is opportunistic. If a street has no sign, capture the asset by dropping a point on the web app instead — same outcome, just no photo. Or photograph any nearby fixed feature with GPS and rename / re-shape after upload.
Related
- How do I set up a phone so its photos carry the GPS location for asset capture?
- When I upload photos as assets, how does Civic.ly decide where to place them on the map and what to call them?
- When should I split an area into multiple assets vs treat it as one?
- How do I log reactive or one-off work (like ad-hoc litter-picking) that isn't tied to a specific asset? — the quicker, unlinked alternative when you don't want to model the street/area as an asset at all