Recently I became a local guide for Google Maps. How do I post pictures of very rural areas along Forest service roads that do not have a listed name in Google? When I go into national forests I take pictures along the way, but Google tells me I have to find a name of an area in Google maps in order to post the picture. This method does not work for me. There are beautiful overlooks along forest service roads that look down a canyon or of a particular mountain peak, but I can’t post the pictures. I have seen other postings of individual pictures in very rural areas without any sort of specific named location, so there has to be a way to do this. Please help me to be able to post pictures that don’t have a specific name in Google maps. For an additional question, I also have dash camera videos of my entire trip along these rural forest service roads that I can’t post either. Please help me to post these items into Google Maps. Thank you for your help.
Hello @IdRtherBinTheHills
Welcome to local guides connect forum. It’s your first post and you did well for asking this question. Perhaps I should give you a welcome A Welcome-to-Connect-Card. This will give you a quick rundown of what connect is all about and how the forum runs.
That said,there is just no way around it. As local guides we are only allowed to post or add photos to POIs(places of interest) like you already know, places like hospitals,banks,supermarket etc. I don’t know how possible it is, but it is against the rules to add/post photos on rural or urban areas. It’s not allowed to add photos to cities towns etc. To the best of my knowledge Google takes care of that itself. Google system choses or decides what photos to allocate to those places.
The same goes for videos. You can’t and should not add photos to these places you mentioned in your post. Hope this answers your questions. If you want to read further Understanding-things-we-can-not-edit-on-Google-Maps
Happy guiding
Cheers
I’m curious if the forest preserve has information on some of the places you’re capturing, like their own map/literature? So “Mountain 2” or “Overlook 124” … anything naming them and then maybe you can add those places to maps? Oftentimes you can put a pin of places you’d like to add.
Maybe I’m not completely understanding.
Such individual photos you mentioned may uploaded in the Panoramio time, or maybe they were attached to a POI but the POI was removed. Also, there was a way to upload the photo to the area but as @SholaIB mentioned such an activity is not appreciated anymore even if we have some workaround to do that.
So try to find a suitable POI to attach and if it is a natural place and isn’t mapped, since we have no suitable natural category in most cases, the best practice is to request for addition with documentation in the support forum. And then try to add photos to it.
I beg to differ. Please look at the “street view” of any large populated area and you will see pictures posted of rural areas in national forests. I have provided a screenshot of Stanislaus National Forest, near Pinecrest, California as an example. All of the little dots on this screenshot are pictures posted in areas that are NOT named or labeled in any way. Almost ALL of the national forest areas have pictures posted in rural unnamed areas. I ask that you review the attached picture then go to the Google maps and see for yourself. I appreciate your assistance with this matter.
at area (Pinecrest, California) in Google Maps and drag the street view icon over to the national forest area.