As part of the #10YearsOfLocalGuides yearlong celebration, October’s focus for the community will be videography. For more information, check out @AdrianLunsong’s post about the 12 month celebration of #10YearsOfLocalGuides and how you can get involved!
Earlier this year, I finally earned one of my most desired Google Maps Local Guides badges: the master director badge. 
The road to the master director badge is paved by progressing through the ranks of the novice director and expert director badge levels while achieving specific goals per director level based on volume, reach, and impact.
While the reach and impact metrics took time, these were easier to achieve than the volume metric. As a long time Local Guide, seeing the emphasis of video on Maps grow over the years helped remind me of how important these types of contributions are to bringing places on Maps to life in ways that complement photos, reviews, and other contributions.
And on my road to 1000+ video contributions, there were undoubtedly a lot of personal observations, lessons, and approaches learned:
Capture the energy
Whenever I am looking to visit a new place for the first time, I go to Google Maps to try to understand and confirm the vibe of the place. Whether it is a outdoor market or a museum, I like to try and anticipate the type of environment that I’ll be going into. When capturing video of a POI, I recommend recording to provide a glimpse into how busy, crowded, lively, quiet, or relaxed a place may be. This can help set expectations for users in correlation with other contributions that may touch on the vibe of a place. I find that slow to moderate camera pans can help achieve this. If the audio of the place can help add color (and doesn’t include copy written music or foul language or similar sorts) you can enable it when contributing to provide a natural soundtrack.
It’s also okay to stay still
While video can inherently lead to a variety of pans, tilts, and zooms, sometimes it is okay to establish a shot and let things happen naturally. In doing so, you’re allowing the environment to behave organically as normal without influence from the camera, and in return you may get a still shot video that can tell a story on its own accord. I love setting up shots like these when capturing city scapes or coastlines, and I personally love recording time lapse videos as well.
Capture what makes the place pop
Although understanding the vibe of a place is important to me, I have learned to try capturing videos of other elements of places that help make them stand out. For instance, while a video of a place and it’s interior may be helpful, I have found that videos of menu items either on the table or display case can help users make informed decisions based on how the food/beverage may look and generally what the place’s main or best offerings may be. Let’s say you’re at an eatery that has live music - capturing these types of elements on video will provide great context outside of what others may have contributed. Even capturing and highlighting efforts made towards accessibility can make a difference for users finding the places worth visiting.
These are just a few of my personal learnings, but as Local Guides, we can all learn from each other in our goal of making high quality, helpful contributions to Google Maps. That said, as part of the yearlong celebration of the 10th year of the Local Guides program, we will be highlighting videography throughout the month of October 2025. While I and @Jesi plan on delivering some fun and related activities, I encourage you to consider coordinating and planning videography related events or activities, whether in your local LG communities or for a broader reach virtually.
