Posting photos doesn't show photos "Added Today"

Google Maps tips & tricks
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Hello Googlers, Moderators, and fellow LGs,

I’ve been posting photos long enough to know when something isn’t working the way that it typically should. Just recently, I’ve completed a 12 day trip, and have hundreds of business faces to post after editing. Over the past couple of days, I’ve submitted nearly 1,000 photos, all being accepted pretty much the same way. The process is simple:

  1. Locate the business, select.
  2. Scroll to find tab called “Photos”, select.
  3. Click on “Add Photo”, and camera roll appears.
  4. Select photos, and click POST.
  5. Within a few seconds, a pop up appears, letting you know how many points have been awarded.
  6. Click the X close box on the top right 3 times, "rinse and repeat, step 1-6 again.

After a minute or 2, one can re-visit the location the photos have been posted, and there’s now a new ‘category’ created in the list of photos called “Added Today”, or something close to that. When clicking on this, one should see the photos that were just added by you, and possibly others, if it’s a busy location. BUT, TODAY this part is NOT happening.

To confirm, from a desktop, I click on “My Contributions” and DO see the photos I’ve submitted, but when pasting the same URL into an Incognito Window, those pictures do NOT appear, and the photo count differs by the amount of photos added.

An additional way to recognize that something is incorrect, when viewing your photos via phone or desktop, the initial count of 9,-12 hits is much lower, like 4, 5 or 6, indicating that Google hasn’t finished interrogating the pics with it’s AI. (each time an algo is run against the photos, it needs to GET the photo, causing the view count to increment)

Months ago when I was new to the process, I recognized this ‘issue’, waited a day, and nothing changed (photos not visible in business listing, and photo count never increased, other than incremented by 1 each time I looked to see if there was a change). To solve the problem then, I deleted the photos and re-added them a couple hours later…and all was well.

HELP: If any of you have more data on this phenomenon, what else to look for, or how to ‘resolve’ the issue, it would be helpful.

ADDITIONAL: Yesterday might be the first time ever that I uploaded more than 6 pics for a single business. On never knows what AI might choose, and I took a number of beautiful, AI worthy photos. It would be HARD for me to believe that this might be the cause of this issue though, but thought I should include…no rock unturned, full disclosure.

I’m SURE you seasoned veterans must have seen this by now.

  • Steve (shunsader)

PS, I’m continually getting emails of “I haven’t received my PIN!” or something equivalent. From the percentage of these relative to other posts, perhaps you could create a category at the bottom of the site, or provide a method to appease these loyal, but distraught guides.

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Hello, I have the same problem, when uploading 360º photos through Google maps the images do not appear in the location. I think it’s a temporary system bug.
If anyone can help with this issue we would be grateful!

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@shunsader

@Gphotos360

The same thing happened to me too yesterday. I think there is some system modifications going on and that’s why no photos are getting published on Maps for the public.

The same thing happened on May 2023. I hope it’ll be sorted out soon.

I am tagging @MortenCopenhagen for sharing further information on this.

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Hi Guys,

On Facebook I have seen several reports of trusted photographers experiencing an outage in the photo uploads to Google Maps. So I believe there is an ongoing glitz also affecting flat photos.

I think the “Added today” is called the Recent tab. And it will likely not be there when the photo upload is not working properly.

Adding 6 photos to one pin will no cause these problems, but I would not recommend adding more than your single most helpful image.

Cheers

Morten

2 Likes
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@shunsader

Just a tip related to your workflow for uploading photos to Google Maps.

There is actually a smarter way that sometimes is faster. If you use Google Photos to back up your photos (this will give you a chance to quickly edit them) but more importantly, if you from Google Photos (for one or more selected photos) click Share. On web, you can select Share to Google Maps. This will prompt Google Maps to suggest a location to upload your photo(s) to. If the suggested place is correct this will be way faster than manually finding the correct pin. If not correct it is worth clicking “Elsewhere”. Then a list will be shown, if not on the list you can do a text search. Sometimes the suggested places are off by a lot but when it works it is a dream to use.

Cheers

Morten

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@MortenCopenhagen ,

Thanks for the input. Things have started working again, and looks like Google made some improvements to the interface, speedwise as well. VERY fast now getting verified, and slight difference as far as presentation after pics are confirmed.

In regards to multiple pics. Google’s AI does the choosing for me. It’s obvious that it’s the thing that needs to be doing the choosing, and I’m QUITE happy to delete all but the last photo after I’m confident as to which is the winner, with only a few exceptions. My Photos:Business ratio is quite low, proving that I understand that people really only need to see 1 good photo of the face of the business. At the moment (after just submitting tonight’s 246 pics), I still only have 6,342 pics to 5,099 businesses…and I take and submit multiple photos of food when making reviews (which is part of that pic count). Thanks! - Steve

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Steve ( @shunsader )

Never trust the photo upload suggestions you get in the Maps app. They are very often wrong and misleading. It will suggest photos that you already uploaded. And it will suggest you upload photos to the wrong pins. Later you can face sanctions for this.

So if you meant to let the Cover photo selecting AI guide you, please disregard what I just wrote.

Great to see you have so few pics per business. Mine is probably higher :wink:

Cheers

Morten

1 Like
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@MortenCopenhagen ,

It’s always good to hear how someone else does it. The photos I take for Maps never leaves my phone. I’m pretty impressed by the tools my old iPhone X has, and really love that Copy Edits feature. Once I’ve made adjustments to compensate for lighting and shading, I simply copy/paste edits, and make slight adjustments all the way through the photo session. Although I haven’t timed how long it takes to edit, once things are dialed in, I edit between 3 and 6 photos per minute, including the cropping of all 4 sides.

SINCE the main objective of my contributions is to help people, it’s quite important for me to verify pin locations and correct as needed. Photos are the necessary part in ensuring I’ve relocated the pins to the appropriate position.

Now all I really need is another LG to collaborate with when I “Suggest an Edit”. I’m sure everyone is different in this regard, but I’ve found that the first couple of edits I make in an evening get published within a couple of minutes. Beyond that, most (if not all) are up for review, some still unapproved after a couple months. It’s perhaps the largest frustration of Maps submissions for me. I specifically started contributing to Maps to correct invalid information when walking through airports, and recognized that errors exist on a large scale everywhere…and that photographing entire strip and shopping malls using an orderly method helps confirm the location before I post.

Oh, of the 15,000+ photos I’ve submitted (and most being deleted from Maps once AI chooses its winner), with exception of around 100, all photos are deleted. No need to archive something I’ll never use or need again.

Thanks again for your help. - Steve

1 Like