I´ve been a Local guide for a while now, and looking back to all my activity and trying to select a particular moment that sticks out, I realize that the activity that I´ve enjoyed the most is uploading my pictures of Google Maps, and this is due to three main reasons.
The first is beause it has made me care about photography. Before this I couldn´t care less about symetry, perspective, angles or color. Now I do, and it thrills me to keep learning in order to produce better content for the community.
The second reason is just to help the people have access to places they can´t go or haven´t been to.
In my case, I really love hiking, and to properly prepare the route, it helps a lot if you have photos of the mountain you´re going to tackle. At the start of Google Maps, there weren´t many pictures of these hard-to-reach places, but now, with the help of the community, and a little bit of mine, these places are getting ever easier to know.
The best examples for this may be the hills surrounding Chihuahua city. The majority don´t even have names, so I like to add them as places, and then upload their pictures.
The third reason is to have fun!. More often than not, when I see a place (usually a hill) that has no information about it, uploading pictures of it is the perfect excuse to climb it, and that process by itself is so gratifying.
I like to think that my contributions help people know more about their own hills surrounding their city, and let them explore it from the confort of their home or that it even helps people who don´t have the means to go there to experience those places.