Overzealous Photo Contributions per location.

[StephenAbraham]

Advice from Moderators / Contributors wanted.

Sometimes when I browse through Maps, I come across Local Guide Contributors who are overzealous in uploading photos per location. I don't know what the reason is, but I can suspect that earning points could be one of the motivation. (There are real authentic contributors who takes time to shoot many real valuable photos for each location, and I am not referring to authentic contributors here).

The photos are of course not detrimental by any means, but too many similar photos, albeit from a slight different angle, over and over and over, which most of them don't add much more value than just a few photos instead of the 40, 50, 60, 100 to a location. Sometimes It makes me cringe when I see contributions like this.

And I guess my issue is that because each location is flooded by too many photos from a single user, other user's equivalent or better photo contributions may not be surfaced up to be seen. Not sure if the 200 photo limit applies to images displayed per location in Google Maps. 

What do we do about situations like this? What's your feeling about this?

I really strongly suggest that there could be a limit set to a person's contribution of photos per location that will earn points, 10 will be plenty. More than 10 photos per location will not earn more points. Then this could/may slow down some of these mass upload of photos per location by a single user.

@YK1001, @ErmesT, @LucioV, @OSAMA, @JulienH, 

[LucioV]

I can understand your thoughts @StephenAbraham but a photo limit per location is not applicable... just think about large places like museums, natural parks, etc. everyone should be allowed to upload more than 10 photos 😉

Some Local Guides in the past shared their strategy to be featured in header, and this included flooding it with hundreds of photos; I don't agree, i prefer to shot one, single photo, where I do my best to represent the place.

But sometimes the algorithm seems to randomly choose the worst photo, so it's a little frustrating.

[StephenAbraham]

@LucioV yea. No great answer to cover all scenarios. 

I was earlier suggesting points for first x photos only (arbitrary number of but not necessarily10), won't stop users uploading more than that number though, omly that won't have points awarded after the limit. I believe many genuine contributors aren't mainly motivated by only points though. So we will continue to upload and share as always above the limit. My thoughts and opinions only anyways. I may be totally wrong in this reasoning.

[YK1001]

If the photos are visually similar, upload to the same place by the same person, you might consider that as spamming.

How many is too many?  Consider a dish of food.  May be you want to take 3 pictures in 3 angles separated by 120 degrees each, plus 1 birds eye view.

For Chinese style full dinner - it can have 10 dishes or more - 4 each means 40+ photos.

It really depends.

[JulienH]

Very hard to decide on this. 

Open is better to me, but I also wish for higher quality photos. I think the 200 limit and algorithm filters out alot.

Points are just points, it's not money, so it's really no use to try to get 1 million points.