Over the years I’ve reported many irrelevant photos on Google Maps and usually, sometimes after a bit of a wait, they’ve been removed. Recently though I’ve found that reporting an irrelevant photo in the normal way (click on the three dots and then click on “Report a problem”) no longer seems to work. Just as an example there’s an attraction in the North of England named “The Blackpool Tower Dungeon”, which on Google Maps is described by Google as “Costumed actors host visitors in 10 terrifying shows telling scary stories from the country’s past.”. As you might work out from the “Dungeon” part of the name this attraction is located below ground, or least it’s located on the ground floor of the building below the tower.
Currently there are 3,461 photos uploaded to this attraction of which (without counting) I’d estimate that well over 3,000 are completely irrelevant and of the wrong place. Currently the cover photo is a view of the town of Blackpool taken from the top of the tower so absolutely nothing to do with the Dungeons. Photos two and three are of other parts of Blackpool Tower, but nothing to do with the Dungeons, and photo four isn’t even of the Tower. You have to scroll down the eighth photo before you find a photo of the Dungeons. I’ve reported some of the irrelevant photos on numerous occasions over the past few months but nothing ever changes. The same irrelevant photos remain and you still have to scroll down quite some way to find any relevant ones.
Does Google care about this any more? It hardly makes them look like a reliable source of information when they differentiate between a photo of a town and a photo of a dungeon. TripAdvisor seem to be able to filter out irrelevant and spammed holiday photos very effectively so why can’t Google Maps? To make matters worse with The Dungeons more and more irrelevant photos are being uploaded on an almost daily basis so the situation is continually getting worse, not better.
Also, I’ve suggested changing the name of the listing to “The Dungeons” thinking that removing the reference to Blackpool Tower from the name of the listing in the hope this might reduce any confusion, not that I can understand how so many people seem to confuse the Dungeons, for example, the Tower Ballroom which couldn’t look any different to a dungeon. However my suggestion can not be verified.
So the question is - is there a way to report irrelevant photos in which your report doesn’t get completely ignored? It would take weeks of full time work just to sort out Tower Dungeons listing alone but I’ve given up hope given the lack of interest shown by Google when I make the effort to report errors.
I agree that the normal flagging of photos is not effective or it takes for ever to be acted upon.
When you find blatant and widespread spam examples the moderators have a more effective way to get this escalated and taken down quickly (within a few days).
You did right by not sharing the link to the spammers publicly.
Feel free to PM me the Maps links to the profiles and places for a check.
I think the big problem, especially around tourism areas in the UK at least, is laziness. That is, people take photos and feel that they have an obligation to share them with the rest of the world but they can’t be bothered to take the time to find the appropriate listing to post them to. In the case of the Blackpool Tower Dungeons most of the photos uploaded are of the Tower itself, the Tower Ballroom and the Tower Circus. But the Tower itself, the Tower Ballroom and The Tower Circus all “exist” on Google Maps in their own right so if you’ve taken a photo of one of those place then why not upload it to the appropriate listing? The Tower Dungeons and the The Tower Ballroom couldn’t look any less alike so to me it just makes the poster look a bit dim (to be polite) if they can’t distinguish between the two. It just makes no sense at all to me and I can’t understand why anyone would do this, let alone many hundreds of unique individuals in the case of the Tower Dungeons. I’ve posted far too many photos over the years but I’ve tried to find the most appropriate place to post every single one of them (and hopefully achieved this in most cases).
Having said that there are certain profiles that I regularly see posting dozens of irrelevant photos at a time and I suspect that maybe they’re trying to score points to increase their Local Guide level and don’t care too much about how they get them, although they’re a tiny minority.
I’ve successfully fixed some cases like these before @MickSloth , and I wasn’t aware the function was broken. I guess your problem might be the larger volume of photos you’re dealing with compared to mine, but I do see strange things like sunset photos at a beach posted on a hardware store site in Maps. Recently I found a gas station with photos of a nearby supermarket and post office posted on it. I took photos of all three and uploaded them correctly, then reported the old irrelevant photos to be removed from the page.
I’ve had success on occasions in getting irrelevant photos removed from other listings but for some reason the photos I’ve reported for Blackpool Tower Dungeons are still there months after I first reported them. There are a few I’ve found which are clearly self promotion photos uploaded by a drone photography business that are still there three years after I first reported them. I just don’t understand why Google appear to be so happy to look so inept, even when people go out of their way to try to help them.