OMG! I have just hit 100 Million Photo views.
This has been a huge milestone that I have been aiming for in the past 1 year.
As of today, I am at 9172 photos, at 4341 unique locations, totalling 104 million views.
Of course I also have reviews, edits, added places and question answers.
I have so many points that it doesn’t even make any sense anymore. Haha.
Like the other guy who shared how he achieved such a large number of views, I will also share abit about my crazy journey.
In the first month that Local Guides started, Nov 2015 I think, I went all out on the reviews, edits etc. Eventually I did get to level 5, and ran out of places to review, after all, there are only that many restaurants that I have eaten at and attractions I have been to. I’m from Singapore, and while we have a huge number of good food, it’s still not infinite.
That being done, I got attracted by the photo view count. This number seem to keep going out, exponentially, and doesn’t seem to have an upper limit or any level cap tagged to it. So I started uploading lots of photos, every single place photo that I had in my laptop.
Ohno, I ran out of photos that I had.
But I still need to share more! and many of the Google Maps locations I saw around me still had no photos, or poor quality photos!
Where did you get 9000+ photos?
So I went out to take photos of shops, restaurants, attractions, etc. I went to one neighbourhood, walked the entire area, filled up my phone, went home and spent hours tagging them to the right places, adding new places, uploading over wifi. This, is a crazily slow process. It’s incredible hard to find the right place when we have such high density in Singapore. I must say that the Maps app has really improved over the year in helping you pick the right place. Now it auto prompts you based on photo GPS coordinates, and you can more easily select multiple photos etc.
Once that’s done, I moved on to a new area and repeated the process. It’s quite crazy, but I think I have explored more neighbourhoods than I have ever. I took so many photos that I exceeded my google photos storage limit (yeah i like to keep full size photos). The initial free 1 Tb of Drive storage was super important to me. If that ends, I definitely need to go and clear out these photos from my history.
So are there any tips or tricks to achieving high photo view counts?
I must admit the majority of my photos get pretty low views, just a few hits a day probably. On the other hand, some other photos of high traffic destinations get thousands a day. Out of my 100 million total views, there were 2 photos which clocked more than 1 million each, and less than 10 which have passed 500,000. It’s also quite hard to predict based on type or category as I have had certain places which seem rather nondescript but seem to be very popular on Google Maps. Lesson to business owners here: make sure you claim your business listing, fill up all the details and add an attractive photo! You might not know how much traffic it drives to your physical location!
My advice: take photos of every single shop, business and attraction that you come across. If there are no photos on it, yours will definitely be the top hit. Otherwise take good quality, clear, high resolution photos, of the exterior, the interior, the menu, the food, etc. The first photo gets the most hits, but people do browse through the inner photos as well.
Fresher/newer photos also get floated up, so you could still take a new one if you haven’t been there in a long time.
Each location displays a maximum of 200 photos, so popular attractions always hit the limit. The above rules help in determining which photos are shown.
You can help to report poor quality or wrong photos, which indirectly helps your photos. But don’t abuse this.
Lastly, don’t just stay within your city or country. Travel around, go visit other cities etc where you will get many more new places you visit, etc. All those are fresh opportunities. You can also join other Local Guides to learn of new places that you might not have known before. If you only go your usual route and usual restaurants, home to work and back home, you’ll never see any new place. Local Guides is also about exploring new places.
So it’s all about hitting the numbers?
Nah, I’m obviously not getting paid for this, although I would love to. 
For me the satisfaction is in getting Google Maps to be filled with useful information so that when I search for places, or when I am using driving navigation, I can easily and reliably find the right info. Every little bit we contribute help everyone else in so many ways. Local and up-to-date information is sometimes crucial in being the best mapping experience out there. We had many cases where we went down to a restaurant only to find out that it has moved, closed down, or isn’t open today. All these could be avoided if everyone chipped in and business owners update their listing.
Having nice useful photos of the place, the menu, the opening hours, the streetview all help in navigating a new customer or helping a tourist plan their trip. Google Maps is indispensable when I am travelling. I use it for everything.
What else kept you going?
I would say that I was secretly aiming to pass a particular person who also has a huge view count and she is one of the Local Guides staff =) A healthy competition is a good thing. Hint this person is also nearing 100million, it sure wasn’t easy getting there first.
If you guys have any questions, feel free to ask below.
Hope you have!