How do local guides get their photos and videos into cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas? When I look at their media, it says that their photo belong to the city. I search it up on Google, it tells me just to add media to a place and that’s it but I don’t think it’s clear enough and I think it would be better with a step by step guide on how to upload your media to cities or at least have them be picked to be featured in cities.
Hello @Louis_Phan
This is a good question that has been asked a good number of times here on connect. Thank you for asking again.
As local guides, it’s against the rules to add photos to cities, states, Counties, countries, Geographical regions in general. The ones you see were primarily added to POIs.
To start with make sure your photo is a good quality, not blurry, clear. Perfect Lighting, Not duplicate or near duplicate. Make sure it’s showing a distinct feature of place or buisness or food. Make sure it’s current and doesn’t have recognisable faces or private information in it. Make sure it’s no selfie or group photo etc.
When you add a high quality exceptional photo to a POI, Google and the AI automatically decide and picks it for certain regions as you have mentioned and noticed. Therefore it’s really not the local guides who decides or applies for that or adds that to these regions. It’s done automatically as a result of the quality of the photos.
Therefore quality above quantity always as a local guide. Try adding quality photos to the POIs you visit. Fingers crossed one day who knows, you might get yours featured on a city or county or country. Hope this helps.
Happy guiding
Cheers
Thanks for posting about this old and very well known issue, @Louis_Phan .
As you can see in your screenshot, all the photos are at least 3 years old.
Till some time ago it was possible to add photos in cities or address by using a workaround, even if, as mentioned by @SholaIB , it was against the policies.
However, a few months ago, Google Maps made a change in the possible ways to add photos, finally removing that possibility.
The issue was highlighted by me since 2017, so it took quite a long time for Google to “close the hole”
Why was it a violation and also why did Google patch it so that contributions couldn’t be made to those places?
Please read Add, remove & share photos or videos in Google Maps - Computer - Google Maps Help
“You can’t add media to:
- Addresses
- Coordinates
- Private residences
- Geographical areas”
Actually photos from geographical areas, like cities, are sourced directly by Google from our contributions related to the relevant places nearby.
The possibility to add photos in there bypassing the restrictions was finally fixed several months ago