May 2023 is when I found out what a Featured photo was on Google Maps. I took “nice looking” photos for 6 years and didn’t even know you could look at the view count. I believe this photo was from the second day that I deliberately took photos of storefronts… because it mattered what Google wanted, not what I thought was “nice”.
I have a nice camera but you take photos with what you have with you, which is 100% your phone and in this case my Huawei P30.
It’s a bad quality photo in every respect, but you get away with a lot looking at these on phone screens. It’s not like you are going to set up a tripod and camera for these things, although I wish businesses would do that!
Photos are not my big thing with being a Local Guide, but I have to admit that getting one photo to 1M views was a nice thing to happen and that was this week (DEC 2024),
this one has been stuck on 980,000 for nearly a year since the view numbers went a bit wonky at the start of 2024. So almost 1M views in ~9 months, and then 20,000 in the past 12 months despite being the Featured image for this location throughout.
My permalink keeps getting rejected, so am unable to add to the leaderboard
Caption: Star Photo of “Ansar Gallery- Doha City Furniture” uploaded on to Google Maps on October 2017 and showing star views of 1850587 as at 2025-09-12.
NB: My permalink Geeting Rejection so i am unable to update at Leaderboard!
This is my star photo. Taken by @StevenBerlin of Maggiano’s Italian restaurant in Las Vegas, NV. Total views are 18,748,990. Photo taken September 30, 2022. Uploaded screenshot date September 16, 2025.
No clue how to upload screenshot. There is NO button to do that.
I took this photo with a Samsung Galaxy S20, and this was when I noticed the signs of the place in 3 areas and thought it looked cool. From this point forward after it started getting a lot of views, I started looking for places with multiple names of the POI in my photos. We ate lunch here that day as this is a pretty well known restaurant. Of course I had spaghetti and meatballs.
I hope I uploaded this star photo properly. Pls go easy on me since I am very, very bad at this. Thx
