This post is all about 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 5 April, 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 (May 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.
As you will see, based on the interest in the new Movers & Shakers leaderboard added in to the May Points leaderboards, I’ve added a new Movers & Shakers of photo views and this way we can more readily see who is gaining the most views in absolute terms. I do plan to modify these Mover & Shaker boards next month so that we can see the delta views in a slightly different perspective.
In conclusion, this month’s leaderboards have proven to be big updates and errors have all ready been reported so please check the leaderboards and then check them again.
Well it’s time for another race to a Billion photo views between @DshottDennis and @abermans it looks like we will have another entrant to the Billion Club. This race will be over in less than 2 weeks. Give me a day guys and I will have the race up as promised.
@AdamGT love the Movers and shakers boards, this is a great example of how things work movement wise.
@AdamGT I can testify to the truth of what you wrote about “less but better quality photos”.
Every month my average is increasing. With a better approach to taking and uploading photos, whenever I upload a successful photo (a few thousand views in a very short time), I go back and remove a few of my failures (under 200 views in the 4 years I’ve been here). That way my number of views increases with the number of photos remaining almost stable.
@AdamGT, I really like this idea of Movers and Shakers. But this is half of the idea that I proposed earlier and that you implemented. The idea of how much each photo earned on average in a month. This gives equal conditions for Local Guides of all levels. I like Movers and Shakers much more than the Points leaderboard. With the Points leaderboard, everything is already obvious.
Great Idea @katydarhel I think between you and I we can come up with a lot of different and pertinent leaderboards for @AdamGT to come up , I had mentioned the how many Million photo views do you have leaderboard?
I’m sure Adam in his spare time has time for these and more.
Hi @TerryPG , I think Adam needs an urgent rest. The best thing on our part was to suggest publishing fewer leaderboards. Or replace some existing ones with more intriguing ones.
I’ve written about this before @tony_b but my approach is slightly different to that of others. Of my earlier photos I tend to look for and delete those that are of poor quality or not so useful. What I mean by this is for example blurry photos or those that show faces or license plate numbers, or are out of date (e.g. restaurant menus), and others that I might consider now to be not so useful to Maps users, taken in my early days as a Local Guide when really I just clicked and clicked without giving much thought to it. So just because a photo has say 100 views is not the delete criteria that I myself use as 100 views of a photo of a particular small business might still be very helpful to that business.
This has worked for me and the average views per photo metric has gradually increased but I don’t envisage that it will ever reach the impressive values of @MelTG , @Mikeinthefalls , @TerryPG and the like and this is why I have said that I have said before that I would love to be in your position, say a level 6 or 7 Local Guide but with the knowledge that I have today as then I would have a much better chance of contributing quality contributions from that early start rather than trying to do it now with tens of thousands of photos under my belt. Hoping that this makes sense!
