How are photo views calculated?

[GregW]

Does anyone know how the number of views a photo gets is calculated? 

I have added photos of some pretty obscure places and would have bet my house that no one would ever look at them but they seem to be getting views. 

[SieuweM]

I am bored sometimes and just go to the other side of the world and click on places somewhere remote and go to streetview or watch photos of it. Just to see some other culture. Maybe there are more people bored and do this.

[Keith A]

If you add the first/only photo to a place, then any time someone searches for it, they are likely to see the photo from the Google search results, even if they do not follow the link.

[Wanna]

We have a doubt on this issue too, No one gave exactly answer in our community meet-up last month. Just guess and guess!

[Marc_G]

I believe its get views from thumbnails based on searches people do on maps, search, etc for that particualr place and obvioously if you are scroling through the pictures of that listing and if the pictured is embedded somewhere in the internet world you get views from that, etc

North Jersey local Guides

[Escay]

Have some faith @GregW. Heheheh! What i know is that Google (search engine) crawls Google Maps very often. Places on Google Maps perfom so good in seach results. I have tested this several times. A business opens today, with a very weird name (one that people wont possibly accidentally type in google) but when you add that place on Maps and add photos, you will be shocked by how many views it's photos have in 4 days. And it will have ipressive seacrh results. This place had 100+  views per photo in about 6 days, a week before it was open to the public. I was shocked.

I think the search engine somehow returns links to people looking for similar places.

[GregW]

I guess I'm just curious and keep forgetting what a big world this is and how many people there are out there searching for things online. 

I was also curious because the number of photo views will make it a little easier to convince some local businesses to update their maps listing. They may not realise how useful it is to them. 

[DanC]

I believe your own views also count towards a photo's viewing numbers. So whenever you scroll through your contributions to see how many views, for example, you'll be increasing the amounts by one each time.

[wasaweb · Accepted solution]

It is a bit of a mystery, but as far as I am aware it's an aggregate number compiled from many different sources: a non-exhaustive (and perhaps inaccurate) list would be as follows. I think any view in whatever format (e.g. thumbnails) counts towards the figure.

• Business Listings
• Chromecast (background image)
• Google Maps / Earth
• Google Search / Carousel
• Knoweldge Graph on Google Search
• Google Cards
• Google Image Search
• Google+
• Google Photos
• Google Drive

I've delved into this a bit: my level 5 status as a Local Guide is largely the result of photographing shopfronts of businesses in London and uploading them to their then local (and often unverified) Google+ pages with the intention to inflate my views figures on my Google+ profile.

[Karancricketer]

Yes this is true !! It does add a Plus 1.

---

@DanC wrote:

I believe your own views also count towards a photo's viewing numbers. So whenever you scroll through your contributions to see how many views, for example, you'll be increasing the amounts by one each time.

---