Today I would like to share why storefront photos are so important on Google maps and why they get heaps of views compared to other types of photos.
Google Maps was designed to help users travel to places in the real world. The navigation can take people close to the places, but not always show the exact entrance you need to take.
This is where a good storefront photo comes in. They can supply guidance for the last few steps needed to successfully complete the navigation. That is why Google most often selects a storefront photo as the cover photo = the first photo = the photo shown when only one photo can be shown.
Cover photos are shown a lot more often than all the other photos of a place. Like in search results and on lists where only one picture is shown for each place. So if you want to be as helpful as possible and/or you want large numbers of photo views you should focus on taking and uploading high-quality storefront photos to Google Maps.
To prove this point I would like to invite you to study the most viewed photos uploaded by remarkable Local Guides who have billions of views on their Google Maps photos.
My friend @MattGatlin is approaching 1.2 billion views on his photos. He agreed to let me share the screenshot shown above of his 30 most-viewed photos
Matt wrote: I’m also a strong believer in storefront photos. Oftentimes, when I’m using Google Maps to find a place, it really does help to have a visual of the storefront in order to quickly recognize the place as I approach. I’d guess that about half or more of my photos are of storefronts and 59 of my top 60 most-viewed photos are of storefronts.
Please go study Matt’s photos here.
If you want a lot of people to see your photos it is always valuable to learn from photos getting the most views.
You can find links to LGs with gigantic view counts on the leaderboards on Connect compiled monthly by @AdamGT from Melbourne. I have also added links to some of the Google Maps profiles that have inspired me the most. Find the links below in the first comment below.
I hope you like this post. C U next week where the topic will be Brighter and better.
Cheers
Morten
What a perfect example and photo you have chosen to drive your point @MortenCopenhagen - Brilliant
As a local guide who has conducted over a dozen meetups for storefront photos alone, I would further like to add that I find storefront photos taken a little ahead of arriving at the store a bit more useful. This is not necessarily a corner photo since not every shop will have a corner location.
I do this to give the user a correct idea of how the shop would look like as they arrive close to it but are not exactly in front of it.
Several photos from the collage you shared are testimony to this though I am not sure if they were taken with this thought in mind or mere coincidences.
Personally, I prefer to zoom out a bit more than shown in Matt’s examples. But keep in mind that the images shown in our photo contribution list often are cropped further to make the list look uniform without gaps between the images.
I recommend the width of the store take up 50 percent of the image width with a 25% margin to show the surroundings on both sides. But it surely depends on the shape of the storefront. I will discuss this in more detail in the upcoming post on
5: How to crop perfectly for Google Maps (November 26th, 2022)
and
14: From where should we take storefront photos? (January 28th, 2023)
All the best
Morten
PS I also really like to have the vertical lines straight up and down (not leaning). Wait for
4: How to fix perspective errors (November 19th, 2022) and
Amazing @MortenCopenhagen Great point. Yes, I noticed storefront or even a clear photo of the inside of the store really quickly gets views. In fact, my star photo is the outside of a restaurant. Even though it’s not my favorite photo that I took, it has the most views.
Can’t wait for your next photo article to come out!
Great job @MattGatlin . I looked at your photos. Wow, those are awesome photos- clear and aesthetically pleasing.
I want to know what people will see as they approach.
It is particularly helpful in climes such as ours (Nigeria ) where Google Maps is still undergoing a lot of modifications, in actual fact people just started relying on it heavily with the advent of the metered rides; Uber and Bolt some years ago.
But, you know at the meetup today and as someone told me here (while discussing something closely related) , I think it was @MortenCopenhagen that; “that is the benefit of Streetview” but this our people I know here, may not have the time to check the streetview, so these kind of photos you have mentioned helps too.
I have analyzed in detail the star photos of the top 15 or so from Adam’s star photo Leaderboards. That I is a think is one of the best posts in this series.
Hi @MortenCopenhagen and thanks for the insightful article and the shoutout.
Just as an added note, since there seems to be some discussion regarding framing, perspective, angles, etc.:
About 70% of the time, I will make a conscious effort to capture what I think is an aesthetically pleasing shot of a storefront. Often I will take 5 or 6 photos and end up only posting one or two. With some storefronts - like tightly packed strip mall shops - it’s usually my aim to get in tight enough that only the subject and its signage is featured, I usually try to exclude the neighboring shops’ signage as much as possible, but with most other buildings I try to imagine how the architect’s conceptual drawings would’ve looked and go for those key angles. These are usually with a more diagonal perspective instead of shooting straight on. Including pedestrians/patrons landscaping and sky as surrounding elements also helps the aesthetics. If there is an opportunity to include additional elements of depth (foreground, middle ground, and background objects) I try to go for that as well. Sometimes this is as simple as raising, lowering or moving back your camera to include some framing foliage in the foreground for a better sense of depth.
That was an Edward Hopper painting from 1936. I just used it to point out that sometimes there is a poetic humor in a composition - like this one of a theatre with its marquee obscured by a subway entrance.
@TusharSuradkar I think you’re right. In retrospect, I can see where some of my photos were taken very close to show a name sign clearly, but then it didn’t show anything of the surrounding area or street where the building was located.
Are your “strip malls” as you call them, comprised of wider rather than narrower taller shops? I know we’ve been advised to take landscape photos rather than portrait, but apart from cropping afterwards, I find it difficult to single out a separate shop from a contiguous line of attached businesses.
I know what you mean. If the shop is relatively narrow, I’ll often just frame it so that the surrounding shops are visible a little, but their signage isn’t visible or at least completely visible.
Feel free check the photos under my profile on Google Maps and let’s make this discussion about wide and tall shops more concrete. Pick some photos you think are difficult to frame. Yours or my photos and we can all learn more.
) where Google Maps is still undergoing a lot of modifications, in actual fact people just started relying on it heavily with the advent of the metered rides; Uber and Bolt some years ago.
