This post is all about Local Guide photo contributions on Google Maps, and more specifically, about the views these photos rack up. It’s an update on the Photo Views post of 3 March, 2023 and consists of a series of leaderboards showcasing the view counts of Local Guides at different levels. There’s a leaderboard for each level and in this way you don’t have to be a “top gun” Level 10 Local Guide with a mega million views to participate! So, 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 York, Paris or New Delhi, you can join in and it’s simple to do! If you want to know more then see this How-to post by @AZ_2021. However, if you’re keen to jump on board, then use this link to register.
Why are photo views important?
We all know that as Local Guides we don’t get points for the views that our photos generate, however, views are important as they give us an indication on how we are impacting on our communities at the Local Guide level. Our photo views give us a good indication on how many people we have helped make a decision such as about a place to visit or a meal to have. So while we don’t get points for views, we certainly get an awesome feeling when we see that our photos are being viewed by many people and being visible across Google services, like Search means that our photo counts can increase significantly and you will see here on the leaderboards how significant these photo counts can get.
Is this just a competition?
While there is an inherent competitive element within them, these leaderboard posts are more than just 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, all in a fun and enjoyable way! If this can be done then these leaderboards will have achieved their objective, their mission will be accomplished! So if you haven’t as yet, join in!
Briefly, this is what you need to know about the leaderboards in this post. For more details see the leaderboard documentation:
The leaderboards present details about the photo views of hundreds of participating Local Guides from all over the world. As well as an overall leaderboard ranking the top 100 Local Guides by photo views, you will see leaderboards for different Local Guide levels which lend themselves to better comparisons of your photo views achievement with your peers. There’s also a leaderboard, referred to as the Exclusive Billion Photo Views Club that highlights those heavy hitting, high views Local Guide achievers. Finally, there’s a leaderboard that shows the top 100 Local Guides ranked by the Average Views/Photo metric which gives a good indication of the overall quality of all photos taken by each Local Guide.
Where shown, around leaderboard sequence numbers indicate that this is the first time that the Local Guide has participated on the Top 100 leaderboards.
An asterisk (*) shown after a Connect Username indicates that that Local Guide is a Connect Moderator.
Double asterisks (**) shown after a Connect Username indicates that that Local Guide is a Googler.
A ? or the words “Not set” in a cell indicates that the respective value hasn’t been provided by or cannot be determined for the respective Local Guide.
Selecting any of the Connect Usernames will take you to that Local Guide’s Connect Profile.
If you’re a participating Local Guide you must check their the leaderboards for any errors or omissions and if you find any, then please add the details in a comment on this post. Regarding omissions, please note point 5 above.
Top 100 Average Views/Photo Leaderboard - All participating Local Guides (March 2023)
In this leaderboard, the photo views achievement of participating Local Guides is shown in the order of average views per photo. The essential idea here is that the average views per photo gives a good overall single measure of the quality of all of a Local Guide’s photos contributed on Google Maps; the higher the average views per photo, the higher the overall quality of the contributed photos. While there can be problems with averages, the average views per photo is a nice simple way of looking at the overall quality of our Maps photo contributions.
While it’s easier to achieve higher average views per photo at lower Local Guide levels, it’s interesting from this leaderboard that some Local Guides show much better average views per photo than Local Guides at higher Local Guide levels! For example, I’m a Level 10 Local Guide yet there are many Local Guides at lower LG levels that are out performing me in terms of overall photo quality!
If we accept that the average views per photo gives a good overall measure of a Local Guide’s photo contributions on Google Maps, then one way to improve your overall photo performance is to have less but better quality photos: the more views you have for a smaller number of photos will result in a higher average views per photo and a good way to achieve this is to have less but better quality photos for each review.
Now on the fun side, you will recall that there was some excitement back in early March at the entrance door to the Exclusive Billion Photo Views Club when we saw @MortenCopenhagen, @TerryPG and @DshottDennis inching closer and closer to get in. In my comment here I said that we’d have to wait another month or two to find the answer as to who gets into the Exclusive Billion Photo Views Club and in what order!
Well the news broke early in Terry’s hilarious and entertaining Race to a Billion Photo Views post of 16 March, and if you haven’t read it yet, then you should. As you will read there, Terry raced into this exclusive club on 23 March and Morten just one day later on 24 March. Now how close was that!!! Congratulations to both Morten and Terry for having achieved this fantastic outcome!
The excitement doesn’t stop there of course as we still have Dennis now with 941+ MILLION views inching closer and closer to snag the 10th seat at the table of this club. But wait! We can see @abermans (Sam) now at 863+ MILLION views moving at an incredible rate of nearly 89 MILLION photo views per month! Can Sam possibly race past Dennis and claim seat no 10? I can’t wait for another month!
Happy and rare occasion to get two new members join the exclusive “Billion Views Club” in the same month
Congratulations @MortenCopenhagen and @TerryPG !
Well done for all the hard work.
Your words of appreciation for which I thank you for are very touching my dear friend @TravellerG . Should you need any help with your participation just let me know.
@AdamGT Again, thanks for the fantastic work and constant improvement you are bringing to the leaderboard charts every month.
It keeps many (me for sure) motivated to keep pushing our Map contributions and hopefully being the best LGs we can.
it would be an honor to join the other 9 members of the Billion views club with our dear kiwi friend @DshottDennis but I believe June would be the minimum time required.
I’m surprised my photos views are gathered as fast as they are.
Living in a large metropolitan (and travelling to other major cities) of course helps, but I also feel I get much more featured photos these days.
Maybe it’s following @MortenCopenhagen great The Storefront Photography Tips Most Relevant to You advice (LGs do read!) or maybe Google’s map algorithm ranks photos higher when LGs rank higher.
Also, my other inspiration is @Herve_Andrieu of course. The godfather of LGs! (>10b views puts everything we do into different proportions)
I just noticed his weekly effort of ~1400 photos covering locations alongside Narcoossee Rd. in Orlando.
The perfect angles, lighting and those 3d photos… OMG, there is still so much to improve before we get there.
Thank you for your appreciation @abermans and I am over the moon to hear you say that the leaderboards keep you and many others motivatedto keep pushing your Map contributions and hopefully being the best LGs we can. Most certainly @Herve_Andrieu is inspirational and just goes to show us all how far we can go. On this, I always say, how do you climb Mt Everest? One step at a time!
I’m looking forward to seeing both you and @DshottDennis in the Billion Photo Views Club soon.
Since I was not tagged in the subsequent comments on @TerryPG 's post (guess your ‘trainer’ wasn’t that important, eh?!?), I missed the whole event! I thought we had to wait until the Leaderboards were released to find out who hit the Billion.
But, like @MortenCopenhagen pointed out, we’re all a little bit nerdy here, so I shouldn’t be surprised you all were tracking by the day!
CONGRATS TO YOU BOTH! We’ve got some new Billionaires in the house! And @DshottDennis has already popped another 5,000,000 views since this was posted. That Top 10 will be full very soon.
I’d like to also commemorate the fact that we’ve got a FULL TOP 100 for Level 8, thanks to @VictorLins and @franzo jumping in!
Thanks, as always, @AdamGT for giving us these boards.
