Help me find this place again: how to drop, save, and send pins in Google Maps

Let’s say you are scouting a field and notice a tile blowout. You need to communicate the location of this problem to your employer, the field owner, or an employee. While you could say something along the line of “go to Field X at the NE corner of County Road Y and Section Line Road then walk 50 feet northwest of the field entrance” that’s kinda complicated and only helps the person if they know where the intersection is. Instead, you could send them a pin and they could use their cell phone GPS to navigate to the pin.

Pins are a really effective way to share your location, but they’re also a good way to save a location with a note for your own personal use. Learning how to drop pins, send them to others, and then find the pin again on your device is very useful.

I dropped a pin on campus as an example. Note that I use an LG G6 cell phone with Google Maps, and I have a blue-light filter that makes screen shots look pink.

The first thing you do is open Google Maps (see right)

Then you can drop a pin on your location by holding  your finger down over the blue dot that marks your current position. The further you zoom in on the blue dot before dropping the pin, the more accurate your pin will be (see left).

To send this location to someone else but not save a record of the pin for your personal use, click the share button and follow the directions to text or email the pin to someone else.

But, if you want to save this pin so that you can find it again later, hit the save button. That will take you to a screen like the one to the right. From here you could use the “new list” button to do just that, or you could add it to a preexisting list. I added mine to a list called scouting.

When you want to find this pin again from your phone, open google maps again and click the menu button (the three horizontal lines in the upper left corner by the search bar). Then click “Your places,” which should be the very first thing on the menu.

This takes you to a list of your maps, places you’ve navigated to recently, and your saved pins! Click the “Saved locations” button to see your places.

From there you can click the list you stored it in and navigate to the pin or share it with someone else!

If you’re on your desktop, you can also log into your Google account and go to google.com/maps. Click the menu button and navigate to your saved pins the same way.

I hope this helps you feel confident saving pins to navigate to later– leave any follow up questions in the replies!