Caption: @LDiamond 's Star Photo of OAK Wood Fire Kitchen uploaded onto Google Maps on 2022-07-27 and showing star views of 351,588 as of 2022-09-23
This photo came about on a family dinner evening outing.
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Clicked by Rohit Gahlot location Supreme Court of India New Building clicked on 19th july 2019 and updated on 19th August 2022.
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Herewith my star photo:
Indeed it’s not my best photo, but unexpectedly for me it got twice as many views as the one closest. In total, 7 of my photos have received over 1 million views. In total, I have 2993 published photos, 3007 uploaded photos, and 136,135,950 views. Considering the fact that the publication of photos and reviews has been banned in my country for almost half a year, and so the popularity of Google Maps is falling catastrophically, I think this is a not bad result.
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Hi @LDiamond
Like in your case and I must say also in mine, it’s more often than not a surprise which of our great photos becomes our star. I believe we can learn a lot from our stars and I hope that you will too.
In the meantime, to better conform to the steps to add your star photo, would you please edit your post and move the text that you currently have above your screenshot to below the screenshot screenshot. Some say I’m fussy but believe me there are good reasons for this. Just leave a blank line above the screenshot 
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Wow fantastic result @SergeySud given the circumstances that you have mentioned. Anyway loading your star photo details here will provide a good base to compare to at some future point in time. Thanks for following the steps to add your star photo so well. Just one minor comment, if you could please edit and move that one line opening comment to below the second screenshot (you will see that I do ask others to do this as well). I appreciate that you may need to re-write it and perhaps wish to incorporate it in the text that you have below.
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Thank you for appreciating my humble efforts.
I managed to edit my comment, but only from a smartphone. The UI is very unfriendly, I repeatedly tried to correct the comment from the PC, even through HTML, but the result was always crooked. Finally, it’s looks neat now.
By the way, I have published an article on my blog for a long time How to select a photo for publication on Google Maps. Sorry, it’s in Russian, so please use Google Translate. The Translate menu should be available on the left side of the page. I hope it can be useful not only for beginners.
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Thank you @SergeySud for making the changes which improves it a lot and serves as a good example for others to follow. Thank you also for the link to your article which touches on a subject I planned to write about here on Connect. After translation it is a great read. I tried to leave a comment but sadly I couldn’t translate the reply section.
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Indeed. Roger that
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Dear @AdamGT
I just finished my monthly profile update on the amazing system you made, and for which I have sincere admiration for you.
I would like to point out a couple of things about it below.
First of all, I point out that by accessing the link
https://top100localguides.com/index.php
often the page remains “blank”, and does not allow access, while the link
https://top100localguides.com/home.php
in other cases it allows access.
From a first check, this would seem to happen when I recently logged in, and the system “remembers” my access credentials (in this case the “index” page does not offer the access box, while the “home” page accesses the platform)
Then I ask you a question related to my “Level User” on the system: until some time ago I remember being at level 8 or 9, and I had started to explore the interesting statistical features offered by the system (compatibly with the limited time available that I unfortunately manage to have lately), and having perhaps noticed an anomaly - to be investigated - in the score of a previous update, which I was unable to register and therefore report.
From the last login I realized that I was downgraded to user level 1, and consequently I no longer have access to the “Leaders”, “Vitals” and “Analytics” statistics.
How can I buy back the higher level?
Thank you as always for your tireless work, promising (and hoping) to be more present in this incredible Local Guides Community.
Best regards
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Hello @AT_Rome and welcome back to Connect
Great to hear that you have updated, I strongly recommend that you do so each month and preferably on the same day of the month (e.g. 30th, 15th or whatever day fits in best with your lifestyle). I always mention this because it provides for the best history of your data which is then used in the forecasting (e.g. charting). With the new system, it now only takes a few minutes each month to update, and regular updates provide you with good returns on your time investment beyond just leaderboard rankings.
Regarding the first issue you mention, I’m not a professional programmer or website developer so I do not fully understand why this happens but the best way I have found to avoid it is to always formally logout via the menu system. I wrote about this in some detail in a comment reply here on Connect but cannot find it now. If you encounter this problem then I suggest that (1) while on the blank page you remove the cookie which will delete any encoded credentials stored on your local device, and (2) return to the index page and do a Ctrl+F5. Once again I mention that the best way to avoid this problem is to always formally logout via the menu system.
Regarding the second issue, you’ve unknowingly explained this yourself when you said that you are promising (and hoping) to be more present in this incredible Local Guides Community. As his may be a littler cryptic, and because you have specifically asked How can I buy back the higher level? , you will find the detailed answer by hitting the system’s online help information from the last item on your Profile page. Because I have answered this a few times now I’m preferring to refer participants to the online help because I want to get participants in the habit of reading it and because it is more efficient of my time.
Thank you for your kind admiration.
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Thanks for the promptness and clarity of your answer, Adam, and for this I appreciate you and your work even more …
I assure you that I have scheduled the updating of my statistics in the last days of each month, and I will take the appropriate time to read and deepen the posts published on “Local Guides Connect” and interact more.
And I tell you that reading the statistics and other incredible information present in the VIP Section is one more reason to do it!
Great job, really …
A warm greeting from Rome, giving you two images of Rome that I took a few days ago while walking around the city: these are the famous “Trevi Fountain” and the “Imperial Forums”, which despite being geographically close, represent two very distant eras over time (the 1700 Baroque of the fountain, and the ancient Rome of the first century BC of the Forums)
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I’m here and always happy to help you @AT_Rome and I’m pleased to hear that of your plans to regularly update. The best is to add a reminder on your calendar. Interacting and engaging on Connect and the leaderboard posts. You have already seen that the Leaderboards are fast becoming much more than just leaderboards of rankings, with so much useful information to help you better learn, monitor and improve your Maps contributions.
Oh how I love just walking around Rome. There is just so much history there. Thank you for sharing your beautiful photos. I also have some from my last visit there but I do like this one. Do you recognize it?
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Nice picture, Adam!
It is the “Fountain of the Four Rivers”, by the sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini (also author of the Trevi Fountain project), and in particular the big man in the foreground depicts the personification of the river Ganges, holding a long oar that indicates the complete navigability of the river at the time of the creation of the fountain.
The other three rivers (the most important for the continents then known), located at the corners of the fountain, are the Nile, the Danube and the Rio de la Plata.
There are numerous anecdotes, which you may already know, which characterize this beautiful fountain, and among them:
- it stands in the place where in the mid-1600s there was a watering hole for horses
- the human figures are in marble, while the central rock is in “travertine”, a very common stone in Rome
- In addition to sculptures of trees and plants (such as palms, agaves, peonies, vines), there are 7 sculpted animals: lion, armadillo, horse, sea and land snake, dolphin, dragon
- the obelisk located on the top of the fountain is an Egyptian original from the 1st century AD, commissioned by the emperor Domitian in Aswan when Egypt was a province of the ancient Roman Empire
- the oval shape of the square follows that of the stadium of Domitian (built in the year 85 AD), where athletes competitions were held, and even then there were fountains that allowed to flood the square and carry out shows with real boats.
And this fountain is just one of the countless testimonies that past centuries have left in Rome: some of which are less exposed and therefore less visible, such as the enchanting “Moses” by the famous sculptor Michelangelo Buonarroti, located in the corner of a church not far from the Colosseum, of which you can find a photo I took some time ago, together with a gif of the Fountain of the Rivers, taken from the opposite side to your beautiful photo …
Best wishes
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Wow @AT_Rome you are a wealth of information on this. We should have made this a post of it’s own LOL.
You have now more than convinced me that you would make an excellent tour guide on my next visit to Rome
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Hello @AdamGT
I have trouble saving recent views of my star photo and the URL of the Connect article about the star photo. I’ve entered information and submitted the page several times. The response is “saved entry” or similar each time, but the correct data is not there. I had no trouble with entering the pages’ information.
Cercis 
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Hi @Cercis
Your star views was showing as 705842 but I have updated this for you. I’m not sure why you have this problem. Have you been able to update before with our new system or is this the first time you have tried? Have you been able to update your Maps data? What device and OS are you using? I ask because no one else is having this specific problem! BTW this is your screenshot URL and you shouldn’t be needing to change this (see 4 - Updating your star photo).
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@AdamGT Thanks for the swift reply and for updating the star photo data. I had the same problem last month, with star photo but chalked it up to general fuzziness. I did not have any problems updating July or August’s map data.
I use my Mac Laptop Pro osSierra to do data updatiing. I definitely will read the bit about updating my photo.
Cercis
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@Cercis thanks for that information. May I suggest that you try to update your star views now say decrease it by just 1 view and see if it saves then increase back up. So that I will know what I’m searching for and to establish if this is isolated to your star photo, are you able to update your there Maps data?
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I took this photo during a meet-up I hosted in Buenos Aires around 4 years ago. I took it with my Samsung S9+ and it got to be the first photo of the Centro Cultural Kirchner in Maps during some time.
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