I wonder about this. What happened? Never seen this before. Is this new? What’s the story?
This is a managed listing by the owner of the store, I believe.
The photo was taken before they left the chain and changed the name. They removed my photo from the POI then, but it had so many views I kept it on my profile. Am I at risk for losing the account because of this?
There are no issues with it that I can see apart from the owner maybe being offended I didn’t remove a photo including the old name of the store and removed it from the POI.
Can anyone clue me in?
Unless there’s a rule against store fronts without people, I don’t see the issue apart from the owner being put out, as mentioned.
I went through my entire list of photos and found three more. Two of them I believe were unlisted on the POI. I must have forgotten to remove them. The third I didn’t know was unlisted, but it’s from an old location of the store, so could be unlisted.
There are other photos that are unlisted that did not have a warning on them. Including when I took photos of a bunch of store shelves and added all of the photos to a review but not all of them made it to the POI. Those do not have warnings.
The moderation of photos is under transition at the moment. So I’m not sure I can help you as well as I would like to.
Normally, when a business closes, the business will be marked as “Permanently closed”. In these cases, your photo will still be linked to the place and the place sheet can be viewed - but it is marked as Permanently closed.
When a pin/place is removed completely (deleted from the database) your image will show as if it belongs to “Unknown place”.
What you see with the ! in a triangle is most likely the new moderation system that somehow decided to remove your photo for policy violations. The AI responsible for the is not very well trained (to put it mildly). There are hundreds of reports from Local Guides who can not understand why their contributions have been removed. When experienced peers look into such cases they too are puzzled. I tend to believe that the AI filter is overly sensitive and makes too many mistakes (removes too many legit contributions from sincere Local Guides).
As the system is currently being worked on, I think it is not worth worrying about the 3 images you see marked as violating some policies. It is not worth your time or sanity to care about this before the system has matured and adjusted to not making so many mistakes. Your account is not in any danger as far as I know, I don’t think you did anything wrong. A quick look at your photo contributions is plenty of proof that you are a great and genuine Local Guide. Your photos look great and follow the guidelines very well.
I have seen examples, where Google invites users to appeal the hiding of their contributions. You could try clicking on the “!” to see if you can make an appeal in a few clicks for those 3 images individually. It is worth a try.
But again, ignoring this is likely your best option. And wait some months until the new content moderation gets tuned in and makes much fewer obvious mistakes.
Finally, let me address your last question about people in your photos. There are such guidelines, but in my experience, these guidelines have not been inforced by the photo selection AI (that selects which photo becomes the first photo) of the places in the past year or so. So people in our photos are less of a problem than years back. But it is still important to avoid photos where people’s faces can reveal their identities (keep them small = in the background or you can blur the faces).
I totally agree with the perfect reply of @MortenCopenhagen and I’m happy to see that the beta not-public message for reviews is going to be applicable to photos, too.
While there could be some mistakes by the AI like in your case, in general, it is important that users know their content is against the policies. This could prevent more wrong activities by users.
Indeed, AI still needs improvement. I’ve found a not-posted review with a few pictures marked as inappropriate though they are just pictures of a hotel room. Waiting for the appeal result now.
While I initially thought it was the store owner who initiated this, after finding the others I think this has to do with photos either not making it initially to the POI or have later been removed by the owner.
One photo was from a photo exhibition at a small mall. I noticed that the owner removed just about all photos not posted by the owner earlier on, but let most of my photos from that trip stay up. One of two photos from the exhibition never made it (probably the AI). Another store only have photos taken by me. The one with the warning may have been removed by the owner. I have two photos from the newer location on there now.
Another photo was of eggs for an egg farm store. It never made it on to the POI. I don’t remember for sure, but I may have used it to create an update because the sale of the eggs were moved to another location due to stealing. I found the info in the paper. The photo was generic, but could have been their eggs. I doubt the AI could tell they were not.
So unless the AI thought those were boobs, there was nothing wrong with the photos except they were not listed on the POI, either when uploaded or even years later, in one or two cases removed by the owner.
So I would posit this has nothing to do with rule violations and the warning is s massive overreach and should be reworded.
