A real misfortune is to use your work email account for your Local Guides work. This will cause problems when you leave the company. In this post, I will explain the options available to manually move some of your contributions to a new account.
But the best solution is to always use a private and free Google account. And should you be using a work email now it is better to fix the problem sooner than later.
Unfortunately, Google does not allow the automatic transfer of points and contributions from one account to another. It says in the Local Guides Program Terms and Conditions: “Contributions to Google Maps must originate from a single Google account to count towards benefits and cannot be transferred between owned accounts”. This effectively prevents Local Guides from trading contributions.
However, if you have a limited number of reviews and photos they can be moved manually if you want to do all the work. Other contributions like edits and new places can not be transferred. And you will lose all the views and likes in the process.
First, you need to copy-paste all your review texts into a text document. Then you need to delete them manually from Google Maps one by one from your old account. Then you can repost them from your new account. Make sure not to repost reviews that are older and no longer relevant.
Hopefully, you have a backup of the photos you have uploaded to Google Maps. If not you can download them by starting to flag them from a desktop. Then the photos are shown in the highest available resolution. Right-click and use “Save as”. Then abort the flagging. This needs to be done manually for each and every photo should you not have a backup.
Then you need to delete all the photos manually one by one from your old account.
The next step is to leave the Local Guides program with your old account. Go to the new Opt-out-page and click/tap “Leave the program”.
Finally, you can now start re-uploading your reviews and photos using your new account.
In my opinion, this would be a waste of time. Your old contributions will remain on Google Maps after you no longer have access to the old account. So I think your time is better spent making new and fresh contributions. And should you no longer have access to your old account you can not transfer your reviews and photos manually.
This cumbersome process is needed because you can’t have two Local Guides accounts at the same time, and we are not allowed to post the same photos and reviews twice. Google Maps is very good at detecting duplicate text in reviews.
My friend @ErmesT has proposed two ideas related to this:
- Tool for transferring a Local Guide Account
- Do not accept Local Guides Registration from G Suite accounts
Feel free to give them your likes.
Cheers
Morten
