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Level 10

Status of Uploaded Photos

I'm writing about the increasing concern of regular photo uploads to Google Maps not being approved or published. When I initially published the post about how many photos were uploaded to Google Maps in comparison to how many of them were actually made public, there wasn't too many photos that were hidden, at only 107 photos rejected or unpublished. As the screenshots show below, checking your contributions screen while logged in and logged out (incognito mode achieves this), there is a difference of photos.

To this day, after uploading an extra 800 photos, over 147 photos now remain unpublished. From having 1.3% of photos being hidden to now 1.7% only for the past month and half, I'm extremely disappointed that Google Maps is refusing more of my photos that I take delicate care of, making sure that it passes policy and acceptable to the listing.

 

Caption: The difference in photos in the 'My Contributions' tab when signed in vs. in incognito mode (public)Caption: The difference in photos in the 'My Contributions' tab when signed in vs. in incognito mode (public)

In the Streetview app, you can check whether your photospheres have been approved or rejected by checking your profile through the location bar. Generally it takes about 72 hours for a photosphere to be reviewed for consideration. There needs to be a way to appeal for these rejected or unpublished regular photos, or even have them released if they're still in the pending queue considering there are millions of photos uploading every day.

It's extremely upsetting that I can't do anything to fix this other than just upload, back up, crop, and re-upload, and that my works are being boiled down to nothing just because of an AI. As I've written and made several examples here, you can be the judge whether the photos should be published or not.

 

Caption: A shopfront photo of Bangkok Stories, a newly-opened Thai restaurant in Kellyville. This was not published.Caption: A shopfront photo of Bangkok Stories, a newly-opened Thai restaurant in Kellyville. This was not published.

There needs to be a way to show whether the photos have been accepted/published or rejected, as well as show the photos that are pending such an approval, because leaving them for no consideration whatsoever is considered rude. Some people have 18% of their contributions not displayed out of 7000+ photos, another having a staggering 28% of their contributions not going through either, and I'm not making up these numbers.

 

You can spend a whole day walking around, taking photos for Google Maps, then taking countless hours to edit and upload them only to be dismissed saying "Your photos are not good to be published on Google Maps" when you've spent your time and effort to do these things?! Fix this, have our photos shown onto these listings, let us appeal, because both users and businesses are missing out. Some of these listings only have a streetview image in them too!

 

Someone needs to provide a solution to this. Now.

Bangkok Stories, Samantha Riley Drive, Kellyville NSW, Australia
6 comments
Level 9

Re: Status of Uploaded Photos

Thank you for this post. I just found out 17% of my photos hadn't been published. It's really a big matter while I tried to post the best photos which taken by a good camera and retouch nicely but 17% is invisible to public. Otherwise, a friend with careless photos (blury, dark...) get most of approvals and views.

 

I even don't have any email or notification to let me know which photos and why they were rejected.

RG
Connect Moderator

Re: Status of Uploaded Photos

Hi @Briggs @RainieGreen while I've not seen any official confirmation I've seen signs that indicate duplicate and near duplicate images are being cleaned up at present.  They stay visible to you but they are no longer visible to other people.

 

Regards Paul

Level 10

Re: Status of Uploaded Photos

Hello @PaulPavlinovich,

 

I do understand that to an extent, but as far as I know, I have not seen much changes of (near-)duplicate photos being cleaned up. Most of the photos I post are either a higher-quality version of an existing photo, or something completely different but relevant to the business.

 

In saying this, the shopfront photo of 'Bangkok Stories' above (as well as a couple hundred of others) was never made public on Google Maps, despite the fact that there are no other similar or near-duplicate photos of the same. It just never attached to the POI and was rejected by the AI approval process. That is unfair that it comes down to an AI to determine whether or not a photo ever sees the light of day.

 

I know of instances where photos are removed time and time again to stick with the concurrency of the listing and in regards to peoples' reports, but this is discomforting.

Connect Moderator

Re: Status of Uploaded Photos

It is interesting @Briggs that there was an immediate rejection. I've not done any testing myself to see if this happens or not on my account. This may be something for the Googlers to review given their greater access to the information needed to work out what is going on. Please take a look @BruceDM since you seem to have a lot of involvement with images shared to Maps.

 

Regards Paul

Level 10

How to check the status of your uploaded photos

Excerpt taken from Some uploaded photos not showing on maps:

 

Why aren't my uploaded photos appearing in Google Maps?

All users, no matter how particular or careful they are with their uploads will occasionally come across situations where their photos do not appear on a listing. As Local Guides we tend to be particular with what we take a photo of, knowing clear and well our intentions of taking photos but sometimes the AI and the reviewing team will have to make some decisions to remove photos. But for perfectionists who take the time to precisely curate, process and edit such photos, uploading them and realising that these photos never reached the public space can be distressing to some people.

 

There are several reasons why a photo might not publish on Google Maps or are removed over time. Some of them include:

  • Clean-up of photos that are duplicates or near-duplicates
  • Photos might be reported, earmarking them for removal
  • Protected or closely-monitored business listings
  • Algorithm failure (generally due to geolocation data, and various image analysis procedures, think Google Lens)
  • Issues during the upload process (failed uploads, corrupted data, etc)
  • You may have accidentally added them with a different Google account
  • Unknown reasons

About a month ago, I launched the Towards Zero project to remove photos that were no longer in the public domain. I strived to ensure every photo attached to the listing, but unfortunately the system is still failing me here and here and so I had no choice but to give up. Although we can constantly see our personal photo number increase as we upload, there is a hidden number that we don't see if the user isn't logged into Google Maps (aka the Public Domain).

 

How do I check this?

You can check how many of your photos you've uploaded on Google Maps, and check how many of those photos have attached to a listing and are public using the following instructions. A screenshot of the two methods are illustrated below.

 

Caption: The difference in photos in the 'My Contributions' tab when signed in vs. in incognito mode (public)Caption: The difference in photos in the 'My Contributions' tab when signed in vs. in incognito mode (public)Instructions

  1. Open your Google Maps My Contributions link and navigate to your photos. The photo count you see is how many you've uploaded to Google Maps in total.
  2. Copy the URL of your My Contributions link while viewing your photos. It should look like this: https://www.google.com.au/maps/contrib/113610891890774395703/photos/
  3. Open a new private window (Incognito Window for Chrome [CTRL+SHIFT+N], Private Tab/Window for Safari or Firefox) and paste the URL into the address bar.
  4. You will then see how many photos are publicly listed unto Google Maps, aka you'll see your profile as to how others view your contributions.

 

So why am I posting about this?

Today I am gathering information and data on how many photos are not appearing on the public domain. We can upload thousands of photos to Google Maps, but if hundreds of them are not being seen by anyone, then it becomes a cumulative waste of our efforts. Recent trends with my recent uploads have alarmed me that more and more of them are failing to attach to the POI, reaching 2.0% of all photos not being published. To contrast, back in April 14, 2018 I only had a total of 1.3% of photos not being attached to the POI. By May 5, 2018 that number jumped to 1.7%. By the time I launched Towards Zero, I endeavoured so hard to be careful with my uploads, and even then that number has unfortunately rose to 2.0%. I deleted the majority of those photos despite reupload after cropping, after reupload again, bringing the number back down to 1.78%. Too much in my opinion over the past few months (maybe the parameters have become stricter to curb irrelevant photos)

 

As I gather enough data, I will be able to lead and propose a viable solution to help better the management of our photos, to diagnose and understand why some of our photos are not appearing in the public domain/attaching to the listing and a better dashboard (e.g. on Google Photos, to see individual Google Maps contributions as they are often interlinked with one another cross-API.

 

So the important calculations here to note are:

Total Photos (Normal Mode) - Total Photos (Incognito Mode) = Total Unpublished Photos and

Total Unpublished Photos ÷ Total Photos (Normal Mode) = Percentage of Unpublished Photos (%)

 

Right now, more needs to be done in terms of photo management and diagnosing the photos that are failing approval. Please help me gather data and participate in this research so we can determine a more widespread issue affected by more Local Guides (such as the Forever Not Applied thread, except this one is a lot more obscure and silently affecting Local Guides)

 

Kind regards,

Briggs.

Level 10

Re: How to check the status of your uploaded photos

 

Here are some examples of posts where people have compared the number of publicly-facing photos from those that are uploaded and visible via their ID (aka their total uploaded photos):

 


Wow, very informative post. I found out I have 7475 photos with 6165 showing, 82%. I wonder why 18% are not being displayed. 😞@dudusmaximus

Thanks Briggs, great instructions and nice animated gif 🙂 I checked mine and I have 96/91 in one account and 62/45 in my other account. Probably the reason some photos aren't being displayed is because they are not linked to a POI. But there are many of mine that are linked to a POI that aren't displayed as well. - @HikingMike

It looks like I am also having issues with some photos disappearing and thus reducing my percentage to 8% missing. I recently went in to write a review for a restaurant that I had previously attached photos to but they are no longer showing on the listing (even though they have views per my contribution page). If I remember correctly these were added and it was prompting for the names of the items on the menu (which doesn't appear to have stuck either). - @Jason_VW

Oh, I checked this as well. I didn’t know, but I‘m missing 1000 pictures, so around 5%. Im aware that not all of them are really high quality, but anyway I think it is not okay, as non of them is a problem... Briggs, thank you. - @TorM

Thank you for this post. I just found out 17% of my photos hadn't been published. It's really a big matter while I tried to post the best photos which taken by a good camera and retouch nicely but 17% is invisible to public. Otherwise, a friend with careless photos (blury, dark...) get most of approvals and views. I even don't have any email or notification to let me know which photos and why they were rejected. - @RainieGreen

There might be one other question on the back of your mind. How come if my photos aren't publicly-facing that they are accruing at least some views? This is my hypothesis.

- Every photo starts with one view, the AI. The AI that determines whether a photo should be published unto a listing uses photo analysis first to check for any flags, objectionable content and relevance to the business/POI. This analysis part isn't perfect, but this is usually the point the AI (whether immediately or within 3 hours of review)

- Every time you pass through your contributions (as the photo's section loads up) one view is added, by you. From my observations, this can usually proc about twice a day, to prevent you from refreshing your contributions screen a thousand times (and therefore accruing a thousand artificial views).

- The easiest way to check whether a photo has attached or not is if they have no photo in their POI and only shows a StreetView image. Alternatively, this can also be observed by a photo with negligible views (e.g. less than 30 views) is sandwiched between two photos that have accrued 10,000 views each. For the most part, with all the photos that aren't attached to a POI or are invisible to the public, they rarely have more than 30. Even the most obscure church in my area has a few hundred!

 

Whether your photos are not your best work or have been processed to oblivion with TLC, every single contribution of yours is important to Google. For the sole sake of contributing to Google Maps, if you were to find out that they weren't even being used or visible to the public, how would that reflect on you as a Local Guide? You might do what you have to do that accurately portrays the business and not have it approved or accepted by the photo analysis algorithms, yet someone who posts a picture of their child or something completely irrelevant has their photo approved and visible on the listing?

 

Remember, for as much as Google Maps is doing their best to protect the integrity of their data and contributions, sometimes your perfectly valid contributions can be caught in the crossfire, and miss a few irrelevant duds. The purpose of this is to revise and review the contributions that do unfairly get filtered out and rejected by the AI algorithm, and give them a shot at a second chance to represent the listing.

 

So this is why your research, data and findings are important.