Greetings fellow Local Guides!
Last year a new graph started appearing in the mobile Maps apps under Contribute. A yellow line illuminates our growth in photo views over the last month. And for each day we upload photos an orange dot is added on the line. The graph looks a bit like a gold necklace with orange pearls!
I saw this as a fun and motivational tool to increase and improve my Maps contributions. Would I be able to add new photos each and every day for a full month to make a complete necklace with no missing pearls? So I started testing this.
At first, I failed miserably because Google’s programmers put a random and irrational max on how many photos can have pearls on the graph. As discussed here, the pearls start dropping from the left if you add more than 99 photos/month. This makes it very difficult to achieve a fully occupied necklace.
This seems very counterproductive in terms of motivating Local Guides to upload more photos. If you think Google should fix this, please make some noise by liking and commenting under: Pearls dropping from the necklace.
Then I set out to see if it is possible to fill the necklace while uploading only one photo per day. Yes, that is possible. Just today I finally completed my private challenge:
There seems to be room for one more pearl to the left, but the maximum number of pearls is 28. Trust me!
To fill the necklace I had to upload fewer photos than normal! And now I have a backlog of photos waiting to be uploaded - which I never had before.
Conclusion
The current graph is working too poorly to start The Necklace Challenge here on Connect and invite you all to join.
Nevertheless, as soon as Google gets the laughable 99-limit removed I will make a new post to invite you to join The Necklace Challenge.
There will be a nice price in the form of a personalized evaluation of your photo contributions. Including effective tips to get more photo views on Google Maps.
Let me know what you think about this idea in the comment below.
Cheers
Morten
PS: To prove I did not just create a fake full necklace in photoshop, please see this video.
