@TerryPG with the takeouts you can download almost everything, you ever uploaded to Google. Also all photos, you posted to Google Maps. Besides the original image file, you get a text file containing the dates the picture was taken and uploaded and also how many times viewed. However, in most cases the views are not the same as what we see under contributions. Why, I don’t know. For roughly two third of the photos, the views reported in takeouts are bigger, for the rest, the difference can be quite significant, as you can see in my table.
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Not sure if your link is working correctly. Are you referring to your top photo of a clock tower with 1,982,879 views, Wilfried?
No @tony_b , the clock photo was taken in summer 2023. Now, I mean those taken after Feb 7, 2024. Among the top 16 of those are 10 from the same venue “in the middle of nowhere”.
But for all of them, I expect the same fate as for the clock photo in the sense not seeing any further growth.
Ah, now i understand. Perhaps there was media publicity and people from all over the country and wider Europe were reading about the opening of this new place.
I sometimes wish Maps had a feature like the old Google Analytics so we could see demographic information about our viewers.
I am sure about that. We heard about it from neighbors and since we don’t watch TV, we wouldn’t have known about it 
What strikes me, is the huge difference from the takeouts for all of them. Since this was in early April, I am guessing another error where contributions were counting multiple times … who knows.
I bet,they have but will never publish any results. But the number of users searching a place is the key for getting only dozens or millions of views for a media item. Only second to that is question “featured or not”, i.e what position in the list, which also changes frequently.
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I dont do Takeouts, so i won’t have that comparison for mine. As you said you were among the first to photograph this new place, it is understandable that you’d have relatively high views.
Regarding whether “featured photo” makes the difference between dozens or millions of views, many of my photos show up as featured right after i post them, but rapid “millions” are not part of my reality. I only have three photos over a million, and two of them are more than 5 years old.
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Tony, “dozens or millions” was an exaggeration just meaning “few or many” , but the point is that the number daily visitors is more important than being featured or not.
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Congratulations daer @tony_b completing 9 years as LG. You are truly a legend. Wishing you all the best!
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Thanks very much Prasad.
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@tony_b @TerryPG @MortenCopenhagen @tekino
I realize this thread has been dead for a while, but just wondering how many new views the top level contributors are getting each month.
Just got my latest update for Jan. 2025 for 1.16 million new views
The highest I have received since the Feb 2024 change was 1.6 million in a month.
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Hello Yaryman, thanks for tagging me. Looks like you don’t have the link to your Google Maps profile turned on, so I can’t compare us properly. However, I don’t count in millions per month. My January progress email said I had 633,638 new views. Seems high to me, but I’d have to go through previous months tomorrow if you wish to know what the current trend is. I’ve actually been getting a feeling that the numbers are rising again, even though the “problem” isn’t fully resolved.
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Since there have been so many issues with views etc. I no longer contribute a lot.
For January I’ve got 322.359 new views.
My older contributions don’t get views anymore, and many of my new posted photos also stay at zero forever.
In my opinion the LG-program is broken and nobody cares.
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I think I turned on the link to my profile.
Do you see it?
I see it now @Yaryman
I also believe the views have increased slightly, I will crunch some numbers and be back.
Yes @Yaryman your Maps profile link is working now. I see you’re entirely focused on Photos, and that is paying off for you. With a larger number of (good) photos than I have, you are accumulating new views at a faster rate.
My contributions now are a bit of a mixed bag as they say. Photos, Videos, Reviews, Edits, Captions, Roads, Answers. This mix is generating an increased number of Points, but of course they mostly won’t aid in increasing Photo Views.
In the chart below, March shows the recovery of the views lost in the February crash. May’s contributions include the uploading of the overseas photos I took in April. If I remember correctly, the points earned in June and July resulted from Edits and Roads. In the remaining months, Edits featured a lot less than Roads. You can see what I meant by the views returning to a more “normal” level recently since the crash last February. Somehow I can’t find an email for September or December, but the trend is evident.
| Jan-24 | Feb-24 | Mar-24 | Apr-24 | May-24 | Jun-24 | Jul-24 | Aug-24 | Sep-24 | Oct-24 | Nov-24 | Dec-24 | Jan-25 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Contributions | 193 | 662 | 485 | 475 | 1,310 | 1,150 | 682 | 1,345 | 1,130 | 1,208 | 1,095 | ||
| Points Earned | 317 | 829 | 862 | 1,796 | 4,438 | 5,355 | 4,478 | 2,795 | 3,518 | 1,301 | 1,931 | ||
| New Views | 949,482 | 346,480 | 935,893 | 351,077 | 364,376 | 416,998 | 387,063 | 390,963 | 381,758 | 516,880 | 633,638 |
I just checked my uploads. In the last 5.5 months, I have upload about 95 photos.
I am no longer playing the maximum uploads for the maximum points game.
Now I am just looking to fill in spaces on the map.
With my last vacation, I uploaded just one or two photos from each city we visited.
I used the map with those locations to create my “travel map”.
The linked video shows the map, with the animation I added.
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Awesome! Very good compilation.
I finally tried this @WilfriedB. My download was split into 5 files appearing to be 2 GB each. But what do I do with this information. I haven’t a clue where to start.
Hello @tony_b unzip all five files into a single folder. For each photo, you will find a .jpg file and a .JSON with the same name. The latter are little text files, containing the number of views, date/time photo was taken and date/time it was posted to Maps.
Thanks @WilfriedB. Excuse my ignorance, but I think I’m still missing something here. Is it intended that a user would open each of those files (in my case 1162) to find background information?? I found files with dates near to the date of my Star Photo and opened each one until I eventually found my Star.
My Star Photo views have been displayed as 2137896 for the past 14 months.
The views in the Takeout version appear to be 2142824
That is a growth of 4928 in 14 months or 352 per month (12 views per day)
Based on the 1% rule, my display number is expected to change at 2159275
So I need another 16451 for this to happen (at 352 per month, this will take 47 months)
@Rednewt74 and @AdamGT should find this interesting.
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