Six years and 20K+ photos - Google Takeout

Google Maps contribution stories
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I’ve been actively posting photos on Google Maps since January 2017, and I mainly got started as sort of an excuse to get out and do a little more dog walking and get some exercise. Before long, I let this casual hobby turn into a borderline obsession and while I’ve been a somewhat on-again/off-again contributor, I’ve really enjoyed taking photos and seeing all the views they get from Google Maps users.

Last year I hit a milestone of 20,000 photos and 1,000,000,000 photo views and I was sort of overwhelmed at the thought of what 20,000 photos actually looked like.

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Being from a film and television background, I thought about 20,000 images and if they were put into a movie run at 24 frames per second (fps), how long of a movie would that be…?

So I did the math: 20,000 ÷ 24 fps = 833 seconds, or 13 minutes and 53 seconds give or take - (just a little longer than a “one-reeler”)

Many months later, I stumbled across Google Takeout and discovered that I could download a copy of all the Google Maps data that I had accumulated - including every single photo and video I’ve ever contributed! I gave it a try (just choosing to download the photo data) and after many hours of downloading I had 8 folders totaling over 80GB of photo & videos. Unfortunately, the dates of original upload were not retained, but for the most part all of the original filenames were.

So, just for fun, I decided to actually take all of these photos I had contributed to Google Maps and put them together into a single film running at 24fps. (I left out the video contributions, and limited this to just still photos)

What I wound up with was a crazy hodgepodge of images, not necessarily always in chronological order, and not particularly interesting to watch (there are a lot of plot holes), but I was surprised at how I could pick out individual pictures and places and memories, even though these were all flying by at 24 pictures per second.

Anyway I just thought I’d share this for anyone else who might wonder what their photo contributions might look like if they were ever strung end-to-end:

Happy guiding!

Matt

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@MattGatlin

Beeindruckend, super Film :blush:

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Hey @MattGatlin I enjoyed reading your post and can relate to much of your story, in particular, with the casual hobby turning into somewhat of a borderline obsession. What a great idea turning your photo contributions into pseudo movie. I played through yours and stopped at random places haha fun.

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That’s incredible @MattGatlin

Watching your video for only a few seconds I realized that the human brain could process a photo “and” the related memory so easily even at 24fps.

That is mind-blowing.

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@MattGatlin

Very cool and congratulations!

What a great service to Maps. You have shared many important insights and it has been a pleasure to get to know you a little bit.

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@AdamGT Thanks for the comments and most importantly thank you for your relentless work on creating maintaining and developing the various leaderboards. Seeing the new stats every month certainly fuels my desire to keep contributing. If I look at Google Maps as an addiction, you’re a great enabler :wink:

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@TusharSuradkar Yes, with the exception of a few generic chain store storefronts, I can constantly see images and remember where they’re located and when I photographed them. It’s really quite remarkable how much your eyes see and how much your mind can process.

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@Rednewt74 Thanks, Alfred, and right back atcha. The feelings are certainly mutual!

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@Annaelisa Vielen Dank!

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Great looking Dogs @MattGatlin You should take them to a park and take their photo… Amazing numbers Congratulations.

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Thanks @TerryPG ,

Mario and Luigi take up almost as much photo storage space on my phone as all the GM pics - lol.

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@MattGatlin

Wow, that is absolutely INSANE that you were able to string all of your Google Maps photos together into a movie like that!
Kudos for actually taking the time to do that math and experiment - I can only imagine how dizzying and disjointed it must have been to watch initially.

I started viewing it but had to stop after about 5 minutes because the rapid fire flashing of random places, people and scenes was honestly giving me a headache. You definitely need to spike some popcorn with edibles before watching it end to end.

How about Google would provide a tool to automated what you did? Well, they own maps, youtube and plenty of cloud store and compute to spare :wink:
( @AdamGT - we don’t rank by photo numbers, but I assume you can quickly see who would be the top 10 to provide the longest movie).
I assume that for 95% of LGs it would be few seconds of just blurry selfies and food pictures but consider @Herve_Andrieu “the machine” with ~190k photos! Quick calc at you fps makes that an over 2 hours movie! Now that is actual cinema release worthy.
While it probably wouldn’t surpass the artistic genius of Nolan or Scorsese, I have seen few Michael Bay that I enjoyed less than that! (But we are talking some seriously spiking that popcorn mate).
Oh, and love the Labs photo - they look smiling - I can’t get my Jack to sit down for a second to take a photo.

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Hi @MattGatlin

Thanks for sharing this epilepsy-inducing video. I lasted less than 2 minutes before my brain said enough of this.

My comments and questions in random order:

In the beginning, it seems that you have been sharing a few vacation/beach images and a few recognizable faces (people posing for the camera).

I noticed that a lot of your photos are in the 3:4 format.

At the very start, YouTube showed only low-res images, but after a few seconds, the quality got restored.

Normally I think sharing only one image to each pin is best, but here it felt good to see places where you shared more images to the same pin. It gave my brain something to catch and some rest.

You live in an area with great and sunny weather.

How much storage space does your original video take up?

What tools did you use to create the video?

Thinking aloud:

It is beyond incredible how well our brains can pick up on visual information from images seen for only 1/24 of a second.

Do you think Local Guides who are into photos have a special spatial and visual awareness?

When moving around in real life I often notice how well I’m able to navigate and predict what will show up further down the road. This is closely linked to areas that I photographed for Google Maps. So posting photos on Google Maps is a super supportive activity to keep our brains sharp and in particular the part of the brain dealing with navigation and recognition. So even though my brain has probably peaked (I’m 63 now) I feel good that this hobby helps keep parts of our brains up to speed.

I don’t think I can pass by a place that I once photographed and not be able to recall this fact. Likewise, when see one of my images on Google Maps when the photos are organized by views, my brain can quite accurately recall the location. I find this kind of scary, but also tremendously fascinating. If I see one of my Maps photos and not being able to recall the location, I get a bit worried!

Haha. I’m just thinking aloud here. But I would love to hear from you guys if you are experiencing something similar or different.

All the best

Morten

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Thanks @abermans for the kind and funny comments.

Yes it certainly is dizzying.

I like to think of it as my cinematic counterpoint to Andy Warhol’s Empire. :laughing:

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@MortenCopenhagen

Es ergeht mir genau so, aber ich kann mich schon ein Leben lang gut orientieren und wo ich einmal war, finde ich die richtigen Wege wieder, es sei denn Baumaßnahmen hätten alles geändert.

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Thanks for giving it a look.

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Thanks, @MortenCopenhagen for giving it a test drive and for your observations and questions:

In the beginning, it seems that you have been sharing a few vacation/beach images and a few recognizable faces (people posing for the camera).

Some of these were photos I took with a DSLR prior to being a LG/GM Contributor. One of the things I personally like about my contributions on GM is seeing the red pins pop up on the globe of all the places I’ve been. This inspired me to play “catch-up” by photo-tagging places I’d traveled to prior to being a LG - Naturally these were vacation photos so they included family members and not just locations. I think the oldest photo I’ve contributed was taken in 1998 with an actual film camera.

I noticed that a lot of your photos are in the 3:4 format.

These might have been ones I had taken with a 35mm film slr or dslr. There’s also the possibility that these were photos that were originally downsized due to early storage limits.

At the very start, YouTube showed only low-res images, but after a few seconds, the quality got restored.

This may be a playback cache issue. Sometimes when I play it, it will get lo-res, but if I pause it and back up a few seconds, the stuff that was lo-res looks better on the second viewing. Also- most “normal” video is much easier to digitally compress - the compression codec uses a shorthand that basically just tracks areas of each frame that stay the same or change from one frame to the next. With this video, each frame is wildly different from its neighbor so it really is a challenge for the compression codec to do much with it.

Normally I think sharing only one image to each pin is best, but here it felt good to see places where you shared more images to the same pin. It gave my brain something to catch and some rest.

I have a lot of places where I’ve taken more than one photo - sometimes I’ve even posted dozens of photos of a single place. I’ve also posted the exact same image to different POIs when it may be appropriate.

You live in an area with great and sunny weather.

I used to live in Los Angeles, California. I now live in a much more rural place with a high incidence of hurricanes.

How much storage space does your original video take up?

The exported video file in H.264 1920x1080 24p is 1.96GB.

What tools did you use to create the video?

I used Blackmagic Design’s (free) DaVinci Resolve for the video. Once I got the settings tweaked for importing stills as individual single frames, I pretty much did a “select all” and dragged and dropped them into the timeline. They’re arranged in alphanumeric order by filename, so there are some that are chronologically consecutive and many others that are not. I also used DaVinci Resolve for the titles.

Regarding your other comments, I feel much the same way you do about posting photos and keeping our brains sharp.

I’m not sure if every LG photog has the same navigational/spatial awareness/intuition or even a photographic memory, but I would guess that people who do possess these traits might be more attracted to the hobby of LG photography.

Thanks again for sharing your questions, comments and thoughts!

Matt

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Hi @MattGatlin

Thanks for your answers. A single comment regarding “I’ve also posted the exact same image to different POIs when it may be appropriate.”

According to the guidelines this is never okay.

But you will be able to find guideline violations under all profiles prior to finding the guidelines.

All the best

Morten

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@MortenCopenhagen

Yeah, pretty much the only time I’ll post the same picture is when the two POIs might overlap (like a photo of El Capitan for the El Capitan POI and also for the Yosemite National Park POI) - not really “repetitive” content in the context of spamming like the guidelines suggest.

Matt

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@MattGatlin ,

Thank you for all the info.

I used Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve for the video.

I had been wondering about this.

Very cool idea.

And really interesting idea about spacial relationship. I think of myself as a pretty visual person; but on the other hand I have a terrible sense of direction.

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