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Introduction:
This post is all about the photos contributed to Google Maps by Local Guides from all over the world. More specifically, it’s about the views that these photos rack up. It consists of a series of leaderboards showcasing the view counts of these photos. There’s a leaderboard for each Local Guide level and in this way you don’t have to be a “top gun” level 10 Local Guide with a mega million views to be featured on the Leaderboards! Whether you’re an entry level Local Guide or from a small country, town or village, or a top level Local Guide from London, New Delhi or New York, you can join in and it’s simple to do! If you want to jump on board, hit this link or just mention this in a comment in this post.
Why are photo views important?
We all know that as Local Guides we don’t get points for the views that our contributions generate! However, views are important as they give us a pretty good indication on how we are impacting on our communities at the Local Guide level. For example, they give us a good indication on how many people we have helped make a decision such as what place to visit or what meal to have. So while we don’t get points for photo views, we certainly get an awesome feeling when we see that our photos are being viewed by lots of people and being visible across Google services, like Search, means that our photo view counts can increase significantly and you will see on the Leaderboards in this post, how significant this can be.
Is this just a competition?
While there is an inherent competitive element within them, the Leaderboards are more than just about seeing who has the “best” photos or the most photo views, far from it! They have been specifically designed to motivate us, help us to monitor our contributions and performance, and show us how to improve and make better contributions so that we achieve better results, and all in a fun and enjoyable way! So do join in.
If you’re new here then you may not be aware that this post forms part of a series of leaderboard posts each covering different aspects of the Maps contributions made by Local Guides. To see an index to these different leaderboard posts and all posts associated with them, simply hit this link.
Cover image:
The photo in the cover image was taken by @Trail_blazer (DK), a level 10 Local Guide from Faridabad, India. It shows him sitting on the steps of the Palyul Namdroling Bodhgaya Buddhist temple with a group of Monks and was taken by his friend during his visit to Gaya, a holy city beside the Falgu River, in the northeast Indian state of Bihar when he and a friend explored the holy land of Lord Gautam Buddha.
DK described Gaya as “a wonderful place to visit, with monasteries representing dozens of East Asian countries. I took a few pictures with some monks, who later invited me to their place. To my surprise, they were quite tech-savvy, using laptops and cellphones. They even asked me to share some of the great shots I had taken there.”
As Local Guides we each know the best places to visit and the photos to take in our respective locations and it is for this reason that I love featuring great photos taken by Local Guides from all over the world, and this one taken by DK is yet another great example of this. What do you think?