I became certified as a Google Trusted Photographer by performing the required task of providing Google Maps with 10 tours of high quality for customers who had business listings on Google Maps. I used Google’s own publishing tools, uploading the panoramas from my desktop to Google so they would be published to the business listings for my clients.
Through my years doing tours for Google Maps, there was never any mention at all that we should never dare to change our accounts or close an account. There was no mention of any consequence of doing that, other than the obvious, losing our emails, Google Drive and Google Documents. It makes sense that once we publish our tours to Maps, directly from our PC drives to the Google Publishing Tools, the photos are no longer dependent on us as photographers, and are now the property of Google Maps. They even have the copywrite symbol on them saying they belong to Google! The status/existence of our gmail account should never be able to affect work we have done for our clients - they had paid for photography to published to Google maps, not to be paying for something that might disappear at the whim of someone changing their domain name!
A month ago I decided to change my domain name, so I phoned Google Suite support to close my one Gsuite account. In the conversation I had with the support person at Google told me he could help me migrate my emails from the old account to the new one, so we went ahead with this. I did not use GDrive on this account, so there was nothing else to lose. The support person not once mentioned anything about photos I have published to Google Maps using this account. This is a MASSIVE oversight, far more serious to me than losing every single email. To my horror this weekend I was wanting to look at one of my tours and saw it was gone, I was surprised, but put it down to the business wanting to do another tour or be removed from Maps… but I looked at other tours, and every single tour I have created using mark@lookin360.co.uk is GONE. GONE. GONE. GONE FOR GOOD!!!
I am appalled at Google and the lack of responsibility Google has shown me as a “TRUSTED” photographer, they certified my, and I’m supposed to be providing a professional service to my clients for Google Maps to grow as a platform. Any loyalty or “like” I once had for Google has now dissipated, I dislike you as a company now after what you have done, I am really shocked, disappointed and extremely angry.
As an individual, I should be free to change or cancel or end my dealings with Google Maps and this should obviously not affect my clients in any way. They are spending good money to create visibity using one of Google’s platforms. They were sold the idea of gettting a 360 Street View tour by a Google Trusted Photographer, and there was never any suggestion from Google that we, as professional photographers, should warn our clients that the photos will only exist as long as we photographers maintain the same account with Google. That would be bizarre, why would a client want to pay for a tour in those circumstances. What happens if a photographer retires and closes the paid for business account? What happens is that Google DELETES all your client’s tours, with no warning, no options to transfer those tours, no mention of anything related to the tours, and you cannot get them back unless you reshoot or have backups of the photos and spend time to re-publish each one.
That is outrageous, irresponsible and I imagine worthy of a lawsuit. I have not finished dealing with this issue, though the Gsuite people say the account is now closed and after these 3-4 weeks is not retrievable, so all is lost for good.