Reporting Irrelevant Photo Content

[Briggs]

Every single day without fail I come across irrelevant photos, that are inaccurate and do not properly represent the business/listing in question. It seems as if our reports are reviewed at a lightning fast rate when we advise that the photo in question either has privacy concerns or is a poor quality image, but take an incredibly sluggish rate when they're marked as potential irrelevant content. Even when we email our concerns to the escalation team, sometimes the results will not be shared and the outcome does not go through. To this day, I still await the removal of all irrelevant photos from the heritage-listed Lennox Bridge in Parramatta despite an escalation about four months ago, and another one last month. What I realise is that many local guides attempt to take a photo of the actual listing (as what a few people have done for Lennox Bridge) to better represent the front-facing photo but are quite disappointed when their photo is still beaten by a photo of a restaurant 80km away.

Yesterday I was in Kirribilli, just on the northern side of the Sydney Harbour. Going through the main strip, I realised that several of these places had a photo of the Sydney Opera House (or the Sydney Harbour Bridge). It doesn't matter if it's a park where the Opera House isn't in plain sight, the local community centre, a health food store or even a school, how users think it's appropriate to just upload a picture of the Opera House on an extremely irrelevant listing is just plain wrong, let alone posting various photos in various places and therefore the Opera House often occurring as the front cover photo.

So I have a few questions:

• First of all, why? How does the upload process decide to approve that the Sydney Opera House is related to some restaurant?
• I know that when it comes to irrelevant photos, Checking the Facts seems to only be enabled in the United States (California). Are we expecting a rollout hopefully worldwide? Crowdsourcing whether photos are relevant to the nearby local guides would better help the team in the processing of such.
• How long on average does it take for a report to be actioned? If this information must be withheld, I don't mind.

The last post about irrelevant photos was overlooked, so I hope you don't mind a few tags.

@JeslynL, @MariaBi, @LucioV.

Thanks for reading.

[LucioV]

Hi @Briggs I think that AI is not involved in photos approval process, due to too much parameters should know, so it's all at our reports. This is the only way! And I suppose that the "trusted level", in this field, doesn't have great relevance.

In addition, reporting photos from desktop Maps is a slow process, and relies on an old style page, requiring a lot of time (including entering email... ?!?!? I'm always logged, why you need my email? and an annoying captcha....) and this is not encouraging; reporting photos from mobile is a little faster.

[Briggs]

@LucioV,

From what Jeslyn has advised in this post, photos do also go through a moderation or approval process sometimes. And then no matter how much I try to upload or even slightly modify the photo, it won't be accepted and won't be approved. This becomes especially annoying when I'm trying to upload the first picture to a place that only has a Streetview image in the first place.

I also agree with the desktop reporting. It's far less intuitive than on the mobile app. Surely they've taken that point? I don't even know why a captcha exists?

I just want Google to be more efficient, and perhaps migrate a bit more map maker functions back. I don't know how the moderation process for that was, but... I hear it's plenty times better.

[germanguidini]

We should all realize that every day, each spot has more irrelevant photos, that do not represent the site itself. Even worst, the amount of photos and videos showing a wrong place are rapidly growing up. This is a problem due that mislead people, and a control should to be promoted. I think we should to earn points by each irrelevant photo reported, moreover, we should to earn more points by reporting a photo showing a wrong place or an irrelevant video, than uploading a new photo or video.

On the other hand, into Google maps for Android there is a feature which incentive upload irrelevant photos. It is an option which suggest to massively upload files from Google photos, and it is driven by the GPS, although is not possible get an accurate suggestion by this way. So, I am afraid this is a great source of photos that do not represent the site where were uploaded. Indeed, sometimes people really do not know very well what are they doing, or do not check every photo, although they are encouraged by earn a lot of points.

Finally, I suggest that would be good have a direct link from the photo author to a Google hangout conversation in order to ask some doubts (if the other person want to answer, of course.)

Regards.

[Steena]

Through the Suggest an Edit function, could we mark a photo as irrelevant, wrong location etc?

[germanguidini]

Into each photo there is a flag which throw out a list "Whats is wrong with this content", there you can select "Not a photo or video of the place". Although there are not enough people doing this, so every day I see more photos than I can report.

[Steena]

Thanks @germanguidini, I will look again for this next time

[dubrovr]

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@germanguidini wrote:

Into each photo there is a flag which throw out a list "Whats is wrong with this content", there you can select "Not a photo or video of the place". Although there are not enough people doing this, so every day I see more photos than I can report.

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I meni se cini da kolicina slika koje se trebaju prijaviti stalno raste. U zelji da sakupi sto vise fotografija, Google Map dobija sve vise losih, neostrih i nekvalitetnih, pogresno lociranih slika. Umjesto da se olaksa i nagradi prijavljivanje losih slika, to je jos vise zakomplicirano. Ukoliko je losih slika na Google Mapi sve vise, a osoba koje zele prijaviti takve lose i pogresne slike sve manje, Houston imamo problem. 

[germanguidini]

Hi all, it is going worse.

Yesterday I went to "Answer question about a place" and Google Photos launched me two imagens with the following question "Which one of the following imagens best describes the place". Now guess what happened. No one of the two imagens were from the place, so I had to shut down the questions.

Can Google Maps include an option "none of the following"?

Regards.