I am passionate about photography and I love taking pictures of everything I can. Corridors, doors, clouds, rooms, squares, small details of the street and more have been the models of my photos. But when I started using Google Maps, and becoming a Google Guide several years ago, I started to enjoy a secret pleasure of uploading a few photos, never too many, to the network to show to the world my vision of emblematic places, or at least known places.
A photo of the hotel building in which I stayed, a street of my beloved San Francisco, a latte cup from a restaurant I use to frequent, all were valid models for the photos I uploaded to Google Maps.
But more recently I discovered that uploading useful photos of businesses, shopping malls and other public places could be equally rewarding. The reason why some of the photos I have shared are among the most viewed from my Collection - some have been seen more than 20,000 times - is because they represent useful information from services such as: hotels, restaurants and airports. A view from a hotel room, a photo of the pool, an image of a restaurant’s food and even the prices of a food market can be useful information for others.
But I don’t just share photos when I travel, I like to share photos and evaluations of places I frequent, which allows me to help my neighbors. In my country, Venezuela, the speed of the net is not the best, but still, people make intensive use of social networks to solve their day-to-day problems, from finding medicines – something that has become very difficult in my country – to finding a good place to have lunch or enjoy a good dessert. And every time I travel (i used to travel several times a year) I always think about adding a couple of photos to Google Maps, to make “the map” a better tool.
And the same question always comes back to me: which is better: to upload something that amuses or upload something that is useful? This is the question that ends up becoming useless now that I know that I enjoy helping people so much as I feel that entertaining people is also a useful task
