In my recent Storefront Photography series I share some important tips on how to brighten and make your photos look better. Please see this post.
Adding more light, contrast, and vibrancy can make your images stand out compared to most other photos. This also makes it more likely that your photo will become the cover photo and hence earn a ton of views.
But we can’t overdo it. According to the guidelines, we can only make minor adjustments before we upload them to Google Maps.
With this post, I intend to start a discussion about what are acceptable improvements and what is an overly edited image. I hope you will join the discussion and maybe share some of your examples.
From my photo walk yesterday in the small town of Fredensborg, I will share 3 images. Both prior and after I made them look brilliant.
This image is currently the cover photo of Susanne Schmidt Interiør. I think I might have given it a bit too much contrast. I’m happy with the brightness. What do you think?
I’m looking forward to reading your comments and feel free to share your own experiences and examples.
Your shop front series was definitely a great source of insight and some of the principles are definitely paying off in getting more featured.
I don’t think there is a guaranteed way and sadly many great photos are not featured despite being miles better, brighter, higher resolution etc. compared with current featured photo.
Either not all photo is evaluated or the algorithm has days off.
I try and ensure all my photos are cropped and aligned before uploading.
I apply a default (Samsung Gallery) filter and a touch of brightness and that is it.
I believe it is almost a “must” in the case of Europe when overcast days are so common.
I believe the savvy smartphone manufacturers these days put plenty of own AI in filter work to increase contrast.
It does look better if not being over done.
While it takes extra effort, I think it does pay off in percentage of featured photos and generic increase of views.
So I do cast my vote in favour of light filter work.
Sounds great to use your native photo app to make your images look better. A valuable tool is the chances to share photos directly from Google Photos to Google Maps. Us that feature also available from your app?
I agree that the Photo AI takes days off now and then. It seems to happen more often when the business has uploaded great (professional) photos or the business has selected a photo they prefer to be the cover photo. But I agree that there are lots of cases where the best looking photo is not selected as the cover photo.
But it is not quite as bad as you make it sound. My feature rate is still well beyond 50% - I think.
@MortenCopenhagen I’ve been fiddling around with your little adjustments, but recently discovered in my photo app there’s one button called “Auto”. Now I’m using that.
@MortenCopenhagen
I don’t use google photos. I share directly from my Samsung Gallery and agree it is time consuming but what will we not do for the hope of getting a pair socks
I seriously doubt that I get any close to 50% featured - I suspect that it is 20%-25% at best (you got me intrigued - I can do a quick sampler and check).
As for the google selection of featured photo, I sometimes despair at the algorithmic odd selection.
For example one of the superstore I visit frequently…
I work myself with AI for many years (It’s just Machine Learning) - it can drive you crazy when some models predict perfectly well for months and then throw a tantrum. Explainable AI is one of those fields that needs massive improvement yet.
@MortenCopenhagen It’s a hard one to pick which version is better. I think that if I saw only the After version, I would have said it looks great. But now that I can compare it to the Before picture, I think it looks good but it does have a slight over edit look (it’s the high contrast I think that makes it pop too much). Being able to compare side by side certainly makes the edits that you’ve done more noticeable. However, if I repeat your same process with my own photos, I think I will also come to the same conclusion that I’ve over edited my own photos!
I chose a selection of overcast outdoor, okay weather outdoor, outdoor storefront and indoor food to show a variety. I have actually streamlined my editing process to speed it up a bit and I hope to be able to share more about it in the coming weeks (I want to create a YouTube video showing the steps). I think it’s actually pretty good/useful but will see how the community reacts to it
Your first example inspires me to mention that very bright red and blue elements can make it look over-processed very quickly. This is exactly why I don’t think it is currently feasible to enhance our photos automatically. I constantly need to check for red and green objects getting too “strong” and then I go from using the Dynamic filter to the Enhance filter. And often I also need to bring down the Saturation.
But still adding brightness is very often needed. And in few cases the only adjustment needed.
It all depends a lot on your camera and your default camera settings.
I think your Holiday Inn example could benefit from a bit less saturation to look a bit more natural.
But I love the food plate edit. Just perfect.
The bar click is defficult because the paint job and colors are quite extreme in real life (I think). I like how the inside shows better in your processed image. But I believe toning it down would be best.
Our subjective preferences is one thing. What the photo AI selecting the cover photos can be different. Maybe you would care to share weather your processed images got featured or not.
I now switched to my Chromebook. And the two red stair stripes look a lot less screamy on this monitor compared to on my phone.
In fact, I would like to step back a bit on my opinions on your overdoing the edits. On this monitor, all your edited versions look better.
Maybe we can deduct some lessons from this:
The interest and preference of the photographer are one element.
The coloration - saturation - vibrancy preferred by the photo AI selecting pics to feature is another thing.
The screens used to view the photos also play a huge role.
The interests of the business owners are another important factor. I guess they like their place to look as attractive as possible (and not necessarily as natural as possible).
The interests of the Maps users should also be considered (I speculate that they like places to look amazing rather than dark when they need to decide on a visit).
@MortenCopenhagen Great point on the phone screen vs monitor (or any other device for that matter). I forgot about this even though I have/had the same problem before when viewing my content on different screen types. It’s very, very frustrating and hard to get right. Plus, as you’ve said, it’s all highly subjective to the individual user. But you are right that oversaturated colours can be a turn off too!
I edit almost exclusively on my phone (Pixel 7 Pro) and it’s set up to Adaptive colours (rather than Natural) and I normally turn my brightness up to about 70% when I’m editing (it’s normally at 50% in normal use). My theory is that I set my display with a higher brightness and vibrancy (saturation) and edit my photos to my usual level of acceptance. So, a regular user who may have 50% brightness and Normal colours set, will see my edited photos to look darker and more de-saturated than when viewed on my screen.
Another way to look at it, is that I intentionally set my display to add 20% brightness and, say, 10% saturation superficially so that the photo is actually 20% less bright and 10% less saturated than my level of acceptance/edit. I hope that makes sense.
And yes, there’s that constant debate in my head of looking nice vs looking natural. It would be very misleading to visitors if all they see are pretty pictures when the reality is a mixed bag. But pretty pictures sell!
Something related to your point 5 is the use of HDR. It’s great to reveal details in a photo which I think it can be useful, but it can also make it look over edited. I use it a bit in all my photos but I set the filter to be quite low to achieve a more natural look. This one needs to be done manually since every photo behaves differently… but for most of my edits, it’s a 1-2 button presses that applies a set amount of edits. I use Snapseed by the way and not Google Photos. The latter has Dynamic and Enhanced look for that quick edit too but I find myself changing the edits again.
And some folks hate this filter, but I apply a small amount of Vignette to my photos to tone down the brightness along the edges and bring the eyes focus to the centre. Again, have to be used carefully.
Edit: Oh, and for the holiday villa photo, I did crank up the saturation higher than I normally would because that photo was meant to go on my social media posts where they love the crazy sats! Even on my laptop monitor now, the blues are too blue!
thanks for the tips @MortenCopenhagen and so true, I love seeing good and interesting photos on the Map instead of the ‘bad’ ones. I do edit them before posting it to make sure at least they meet standard quality.
But sometimes, I use the camera directly from Google Maps app and that can be problematic if the result is nos as you want it to be since it has no editing menu, if I’m not mistaken.
I agree that opening camera from inside Google Maps is giving us very limited options. So much so that I will not try again . I remember not even zoom being available.
I like the saturated colors and how you managed the balance between the indoor and exterior lights.
But one aspect you could try is keeping the store name/sign centered horizontally in your shots. But it is difficult indeed. Often our shots are auto-cropped to the square format. And then the Aldi name will be lost or cut in some of your images.
@MortenCopenhagen Thanks for sharing this it’s one of the important thing since we have featured photos and we try to get maximum photos featured.
Your normal photos look pretty decent though.
Your first photo looked great post edit > The main door in center, the text over it and the interior became quite clear and the blue windows on top left became better, got the good contrast. It was fine edit.
However in second pic center became really good, red brick wall stands out better now but if you look at right bottom, over exposure seeps in, the text LIANE MORIARTY on book cover almost became unreadable after edit.
In third the green color grass, blue chair and yellow bricks look bit over done.
However what I have noticed that photos look way better in mobile even pretty ok in mobile connect. I’m using desktop and i found even photos I uploaded looked nice then aren’t look that nice when viewed in desktop connect.
