For the last week or two, I am running into some venues where I am awarded no points for photo uploads and the photos don't appear to be posting to the venue's page. My account is in good standing as far as I know, and other contributions are awarded normally. Has there been a change in the way Google accepts photos?
In one case it was a chain restaurant where I tried to submit two food photos, and another was a different restaurant where I was posting a picture of the interior that had been recently updated a bit. In both cases, each venue had similar (but not exact) photos and already had dozens of existing snaps, so I'm wondering if Google have implemented something new to cut back on the number of photos submitted. As an experiment I re-submitted one of the food photos via the desktop Maps page and it accepted it, but it never showed up on the venue page, either. So there is definitely a mystery afoot.
To be clear, it's only certain venues, and it appears they are chains with lots of photos already. I took some exterior photos of local businesses today as a test and submitted them since their Maps entries had no user contributed images, and got points as I normally do. So I'm thinking they're shifting to a "quality not quantity" approach, but I'd like it if someone could confirm that.
It's not a huge deal, but in the majority of the cases my photos were unique images that were not even closely related to other already-submitted photos.
~CrackedLCD
2022
