I’ve read plenty of threads that talk about views/photo as a way to supposedly measure one’s photo’s quality, and possibly useful longevity. But, what’s the average age of all these photos I’m supposed to be comparing to? My OLDEST photo was taken on April 2 this year, and the bulk were taken after June 2. How am I to consider making a comparison when most of my photos are less than 2 months old? The comparable metric should be X Views/Photo PER MONTH. That’s something I could compare to. Otherwise, I’ll need to wait a few years before the views/photo comparison holds any water.
Also, I strive to find placement errors in Map Pins and submit new businesses. To tackle this, I’ve been shooting entire strip malls in a methodical manner, including small mom and pop shops like Barbers, Nail Salons, Chiropractors, Dental Offices, Smoke Shops, all of which generate very little traffic. Of the 5,418 businesses I’ve photographed hundreds of them are of the type just mentioned. Photos of those business have statistically had the highest percentage of issues, and may benefit the most by my edits and submissions, as well as confirming what the store front looks like when pins may NOT be verified (out of my control). I DO delete 2/3 of the photos that I submit, since I wait until Google’s AI figures out which of my photos are the winners, but always leave one photo per business, so viewers continue to see what the building looked like most recently.
For those of you that are using the Views/Pic method, are you deleting those photos that may make a big difference to that business, so as to raise your views/pic ratio? If so, how old are the photos when the ‘weeding process begins’?
Thanks in advance for any light you can shed on this topic. Just a ‘math guy’ who needs to understand the numbers a little better. I’m sure if @AdamGT doesn’t know, he’ll know who to ask. - SHunsader
Great and legit questions. I don’t see any misunderstandings in what you wrote. And the fact that the number of photo views grow with time is what it is.
@AdamGT resently introduced a new set of leaderboards to address exactly this. He started reporting the number of new views added in just the past month.
This is for practical reasons limited to the star photos as far as I recall.
This metric is only available when we have reported data in two consecutive months. (so I need to remember to update my leaderboard data later today ).
You also asked when we should delete low performing images.
I understand your question, and I think the concept of letting the photo selection AI help you decide which photo to keep and which to delete is the ultimate way to do it.
But it is in my opinion also overdoing it. Photos not selected by the AI can be super helpful and reveal details of huge relevance to some Maps users.
So by gaming the system to keep your metric views/pic high might not always be what is most helpful to Maps users.
Keep in mind that Google Maps uses the AI or order all photos. So users will need to scroll down to find the details they are looking for. And by deleting a lot or most of your photos will rob people in wheelchairs a chance to scroll down and find info on bumps at tre entrance (just an example). If they want to scroll down, please let them.
So I don’t have an answer except that it could be worth discussing further if we are sharing photos to gratify our self-interest in climbing the leaderboards or be as helpful to Maps users as possible.
One other related and new metric is the green number shown on our contribution front page in the app. It shows how many new views we got in the past 7 days.
You could suggest to @AdamGT that this metric is also recorded for the Leaderboards. But it sure has the disadvantage that LGs will a lot of older photos will also get more views per week than younger LGs.
But this green number divided by your number of photos might be what you are looking for.
@AdamGT I am aware that the green number is not available on desktops
Thanks for pointing up the green number @MortenCopenhagen . I’ve seen it occasionally but never knew what it was. Is there any literature on this feature, and how do we know it relates to the last 7 days?
@shunsader , thank you for raising this question in the forum. I agree with @MortenCopenhagen that there needs to be a balance between managing ones av views /Photo and making Maps as helpful as possible.
Some of it depends on what photos you are submitting. If you are submitting two or three different storefront views, I think it makes perfect sense then to later remove the ones that are not getting many views.
Or if you see that there are many other similar photographs besides yours. The second factor to consider is how large the business is and how many existing photographs there are. With a large business with lots of photographs, if your photographs are not contributing anything new or anything in a better way, I think it’s okay to delete them. However with small or especially new businesses I think it’s important to leave them so that even if they area small help they’re still there. @Mikeinthefalls has posted on this subject. I have been going back to the oldest of my six years of photos and have not hesitated to remove them when they have very few views (I had hundreds with < 100 views) and there is no compelling reason to leave them.
I think the one metric that would be most useful, but virtually impossible to calculate, is how one’s photos are doing compared to the other top photos for that location. Both @tony_b andI have tried doing this on a limited scale but it is extremely tedious.
Thanks for your insight. Always helpful. Yes, I’ve probably overdone it in regards to deleting photos, probably because it gets more and more difficult to delete photos after a few thousand have been added in a short period of time.
Can you elaborate on what a ‘recount’ is?
I have yet to come up with some type of system/method/value for choosing when to cut and when to keep. Some restaurant and big box stores can yield upwards of 15,000 views per day, while most that are in the #1 spot are in the 2,500 to 8,000 views/day range. If the ones of the same building yield 20-30 views/day, should I cut those? How about 200+? Sometimes photos don’t make it into the $1 spot, and a few of them track the same way…like 100-200 per day for 2 of them, and only 20 vpd on the others.
What say the rest of you? What’s your formula on deleting, and how long do you wait before deleting? @Rednewt74 , I’ve already heard from you, and as always, greatly appreciate your feedback.
The sum of photo and total views are updated only once or twice per week. So sometimes you will see that the green section or the last bit is flat (no increase). This is because Google has wisely chosen not to spend a ton of computer ressources as this is not time critical as navigation is.
Together with Ermes I explained this in details here:
Lately I have been noticing that individual photo view counts are updating frequently (several times a day), even though the total View count has not changed. Eventually that number updates to the new correct total. Has anyone else noticed this?
@Rednewt74 , Here’s a screenshot of my Updates calendar, showing both my view count, and time of day the update occurred. I’ve been getting frequent updates this week.
I don’t have a very rigid formula @shunsader . I note you said your contributions are only 2 months old or less. When I started deleting, I went through all my oldest photos (4 years old) and deleted anything with less than 100 views. Also some with a bit higher if I’d uploaded multiple photos of a place and one was ridiculously lower than the others (for example 399, 6000, 7200). Then I came back a few weeks later and went through my 3-year-old photos. Subsequently, my 2 and 1 year photos were checked based on the same criteria. The really recent ones have not been checked for underperformance, although I have seen a few I think I should remove.
LOVE both methods you’ve indicated, and thanks to @TerryPG for inking his formula in the first place. Thanks for doing the legwork. Based on these numbers, looks like I’ve been a bit aggressive on deletions. The example you provide regarding ridiculously low numbers is similar to what I’ve been using. KNOWING that the start range for a photo, after AI has interrogated is anywhere from 9-12 views, I’ll start deleting when one of the photos gets beyond 50, and the others haven’t moved yet, or haven’t exceeded 17. If all are on the move, ANY photo that’s less than 1/10th the winner gets kicked, unless that photo is already greater than 500. These measurements are usually taken within a few days of posting, so big winners that are getting thousands of views per day are clearly ‘the chosen one’, and don’t need sidekicks that are smaller than 10% of the winner.
I’ll post an update to this thread once I’ve established a new set of short term rules, so others can see what I’ve been doing…the aggressive deletion style. - Steve
Hi @tony_b And @shunsader I have actually updated my formula to get rid of unproductive photos.
Like a lot of guides right now I am struggling with reviews and photos being hidden, I know Google will correct it eventually, so In the last 2 weeks it gave me the opportunity to go thru all my photos and delete nonproductive ones, I did remove over 600 photos. When I first started guiding I like, a lot of guides posted way too many photos of a POI. I did the same, and these photos are not getting hits 3,4, or 5 years later. My new Formula makes it much easier to keep in balance, Tony this one is even stricter but as I said before make your own criteria based on your numbers, location etc. Here goes
I was looking at @TerryPG 's criteria for deleting photos, and I thought “I bet I’d have to delete 50% or more of my photos for the last two weeks”. So I did a count and the math. Here is the result
photos 1 week old
photos 2 week old
percent under 100
36.84%
percent under 200
32.08%
Total photos
76
Photos <100
28
Total photos
53
Photos <200
17
To my surprise the percentage was lower than I expected. How do you think this compares with your numbers?
While TerryPG does say to adjust based on your location, etc. I think this point really needs to be emphasized.
A number of my “failure to thrive” images are unique to the POI, are at a newly added POI, or at a POI that isn’t going to get the traffic of a major business. If you are shooting high profile places and/or shooting in a population dense location , you’ll need a different criteria than if you are shooting lower profile places in a less population dense location.
Also, you may need to consider the timing. Is the POI seasonal (think ice-cream or tax consultant), are you posting at the beginning or end of its busy period? As @MortenCopenhagen points out , our goal should always be to make Maps more useful.
As you would guess, my total photos for one month were less than you did in one week, so I expanded the period of my analysis.
Using the formula by @TerryPG , 50% of my 1-week photos are under 100 views, my 2-week and 3-week photos are excelling, while 50% of my 1-month photos are below 500 views. A quick glance at my 2-month photos shows more failed efforts, along with some big successes, but I didn’t want to extend my chart any further to count them properly. As @AdamGT would say, even the smallest number of views must’ve helped somebody. But as it’s a new month, I’ll definitely be doing some deleting this weekend. In a small place like where I live, it probably doesn’t make sense to delete anything less than 6 months old unless there’s some compelling reason other than age.
I was lucky to have some time in a place that was ripe for new photos.
I agree with your 6 month time frame and with your and Adam’s thought about it having helped at least some people. In August I was really trying to get back to 20,000 points and just missed it by a few. But now that it’s after Sept first, I too will be going back and cleaning up some older photos that have stopped getting views. I think I must have earned the points between 17,000, and 20,000 two or three times.
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