This is on my computer, not a cell phone. Every time I look up directions to some place I have to manually enter my home address. I haven’t found a way to save that location so far.
And I don’t want it to transfer to my phone since I use that on the go and not from home.
From Google Maps click the menu button: The 3 lines
Click Your Data in Maps
Go to the Home & work addresses and set either or both.
In the search window, click the hamburger (the three parallel lines) to open the menu. Click “Saved”, then click “Favorites” under Lists. You can then edit the favorites and add frequently used locations (the list is private to you).
I’ve done both of those things (set a Home address, and made that address a Favorite) and it still doesn’t come up as the default starting location when I start a route map, or indeed have any effect at all on the route map. I think that’s what @mixdenny was asking for. It’s certainly something I would like. (Windows PC, Opera browser, if that makes a difference).
Now whenever you ask for directions, just type Home in the box. I should have mentioned that part. I think after you do that once, it should come up as a suggestion in the future.
There is no way to default a location in through Google settings. You would probably need some sort of script.
Another possibility: Ask it for directions to somewhere from “home”. If it doesn’t know for sure where that is, it’ll ask you to confirm. And it’ll probably have a pretty good guess.
And then click the magnifying glass Search icon. At least that’s what I had to do.
Another option is to plug your address into google maps and bookmark the resulting page. Then use the bookmarked page as your map “start” page.
I usually just use my zipcode for a start address in Google nav. That’s not the part of the route I need help with and saves half the tedious keyboard entry.
I really struggle with this too. Though I definitely have all the settings correct, and it does start on the right place sometimes, it’s also drawing info from my IP address which is not only dynamic and updates every few months, but is so wide a range, basically it could be anywhere across a quarter of the city, and as it fights between the two options of my setting and an IP it ends up just as a best guess. Which makes it kind of futile.
Oh well.
After setting up your route just go to options, below your location choices, and choose copy link. It will give you a shortened URL that is that specific trip, Save it wherever and just paste into a browser. You don’t even need Maps open.
Pretty sure Google’s default is always “from your current location”. Which can be pretty inaccurate if you’re on a desktop computer and it’s locating you by IP.
If you want directions from somewhere you’re not currently at, you’ll have to take the separate step of changing the starting address. If you’ve saved your Home and/or Work addresses, they should be at the top of the list when you click the “from” bar to choose.
If you use Chrome, there’s a browser trick you can use to make this process easier: saving a Google Maps directions URL as a “site search”.
For example, given a URL like:
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/source/%s
(where you’d modify source to be your actual home address, or simply the word home if you’d already saved it to your Google Maps as your home location)
You can add it as Chrome site search and give it a keyword like “gmaps”:
Then, you can type in the address bar “gmap airport” or “gmap safeway” or whatever and it’ll show you directions to the nearest airport/Safeway from your home.
It’s not always perfect at guessing the destination, so if you prefer, you can also leave out the /%s part of that URL so it’d look something like:
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/home/ (you can also just bookmark that if you don’t want to use the site search).
If you just open that link, it’ll pop up the directions page with home pre-set and you can type in whatever destination you want (with autocomplete suggestions).
I don’t think the SDMB allows images or I’d post some, sorry 
But it shouldn’t be hard to set up and can be a real time saver.
I’m not sure if a similar feature is available in other browsers. Firefox used to have it and called it Quicksearch, but it seems like they discontinued that in recent versions?
You must have been away. You can post images, they just have to be remotely hosted somewhere.
Ah, it’s been a while. How times have changed 