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Level 9

What I have learned by posting 10600+ photos, earning 8300+ points and getting 130+ million views

My Local Guides journey stared about 6 months ago after being pestered by Google Maps to start sharing my local knowledge. I’m not a professional photographer, but photography has been my main hobby for 30+ years, so I’m pretty skilled at it and this seemed like a good way of sharing my photos.

 

I take a LOT of pictures locally and everywhere I travel, so the first thing I did was to browse through my recent photo collection for pictures that were location related and posted around 100 of them to Google Maps. Within hours I was a level 3 guide and was hit with the intoxicating feeling that this was a platform that would let me share my pictures and have them be useful to a large audience.

 

Within days I had thousands of views, but as with anything I felt the urge to master anything I put any effort into, so I started to do my research on how to gather more points and what pictures got most views. I started browsing Google maps to sample a cross-section of what pictures were available and popular for a set of local businesses and locations. My initial findings was that most pictures were shot with a cell phone in bad lighting (and did not look good), of random interior parts of businesses and the occasional store front picture of mixed quality. The other categories of images (that was typically the selected main shot) was pictures Google had sourced from the web or professionally taken pictures that the business owner themselves had posted. If they were present, the later type of images was typically the one representing the business.

 

With this in mind I started experimenting with uploading pictures taken with my cell phone, point & shoot zoom camera and my high end DSLR camera. My initial finding was that storefront pictures showing the entrance of the business and that included their logo or business name almost immediately was picked by Google Maps AI/Algorithms to be the lead pictures for locations where there was not a lot of previous pictures available.

 

What I also discovered was that the better quality picture the faster they got picked to be the one top ranking picture for the location and thereby got a lot of views.

 

These are elements I experienced had to be in a picture to be chosen as the main image for a location:

  • High technical quality (resolution, focus, balanced light/colors)
  • Framing a storefront to include ground, sky, trees and other appealing elements.
  • They almost all had the company logo and business name in them.
  • Rarely was interior shots chosen as the leading image, but shots of appealing food, menus and hours of operation pictures occasionally got good traction.

The images that included the following was rarely chosen:

  • Close up pictures of people.
  • Low technical quality (blurry, dark, low resolution, etc.)
  • No objects relevant to the business in them.

I have to confess I am a software engineer with some knowledge of what Google has achieved in image recognition technologies (through reading news articles).

 

The list above seems to confirm to me that no people and just the images themselves (as ranked in comparison by AI to a large set of training images chosen by Google) and their usage pattern are part of the algorithm choosing the priority of what image will represent a location. Only the top pick for a location usually get many views, so you want to have that image.

 

At this point I had posted about 1000 pictures in about a month and I sat down and made a plan for how to get as many point and views as possible.

It boils down to this.

  • If you just wants as many points as possible you will take one picture (of any quality) of a location and move on to the next as fast as possible.
  • If you want as many views as possible you have to choose your locations carefully and submit high quality content to have your picture selected as the top pick.

In the beginning I was somewhat focused on gathering points, but this seemed silly after a while as there was no more Google guides levels to earn and what I really wanted to do was to make a positive impact to the quality of Google maps in my area and to reach as many people as possible with my pictures by getting many views.

 

I also experienced that great images that I posted for high profile locations (already with many pictures) suddenly got picked to be the primary image 2-4 weeks after I posted them and then sometimes got switched out for some other low quality image 2-4 weeks later. It seems like the Google AI at certain times re-evaluates all images and switch in a new one just because it’s time to try something new, even if that may be a low quality image.

 

Here is what I ended up doing for the next 4 months to get me from a few ten-thousand picture views in total to over 100 million (and close to 1 million new views per day).

  • I take most of my pictures during my lunch break at work. I use Google maps to pick an area I have not visiting yet, that contains around 100-200 businesses (2-3 strip malls, 1 large mall, dense business district, etc.).
  • I have discovered that certain businesses will create a lot of views if you can get your picture rated as the top pick:
    • Movie Theaters
    • Media businesses like newspapers and TV stations.
    • Department Stores
    • Mall entrance with sign that includes the mall name.
    • Big Box Stores (Ikea, Best Buy, Target, Costco, Sam’s Club,.. )
    • Youth focused stores (H&M, Forever 21, Sephora, Express,…)
    • Airports and airlines located there
    • DMV’s and public building
    • Other high traffic stores (Home Depot, Lowes,… )
    • In general what gets a lot of searches on Google Maps
  • In the areas that are very dense with businesses I typically take a quick exercise walk while snapping a good picture of each business as I pass at a distance. You will want to be 30+ feet or more from the storefront to get a good picture.
  • I use a typical point and shoot camera (with good wide angle capability) that gives me much better pictures than a cell phone (and has a zoom), but does not typically draw any special attention from business owners or security personnel.
  • For less densely populated areas like strip malls and areas with big box stores I typically shoot from my car (with open windows). It turns out that the perfect distance to get a good shot is typically where you can drive past in front of stores. Please make sure you can stop the car completely while taking the picture as I would not recommend taking any pictures from a moving vehicle. I try to drive past the stores, so that I am in the outside lane with the driver window facing the stores.
  • Lunch time also provides the best light as the sun is high in the sky. In the morning or evening the sun often will be behind the storefront and to get a good picture you will have to get in the shadow of the building to avoid shooting into the sun.
  • For indoor malls I always stop and hold the camera still to get a clear image as the light is typically much lower than outside. Indoors I also typically take a burst of images to make sure at least one is without motion blur. Mall security does not typically like a systematic documentation of the premises, so I do just a few stores in an area before moving on.
  • I typically get 100-200 useful new images from a typical one hour lunch break.

It turns out taking the pictures is the easy part. After a typical active week gathering pictures during lunch, I sometimes have 1000 pictures on my camera, out of which maybe 500 are unique and of good quality. Here is where a good workflow comes in place to get these onto Google Maps.

 

First of all, sharing pictures to Google Maps on your cellphone is fine for an occasional picture, but largely unusable for large batches of pictures.

 

Here is my workflow:

  • I load all the pictures into a folder on my computer. Browse through them and sort out the good from the bad.
  • From the usable batch I then select the pictures that I want to further enhance in an editing software. I do not bother to enhance pictures of small businesses that will provide a limited amount of views, but I make sure that all picture of businesses that typically provided lots of views (mentioned above) looks as good as possible. Brightening shadows and enhancing contrast are the two things I apply most often.
  • You will want a PC with dual screen or the ability to do a split screen, so you can have both your image explorer/editor open and a web browser with Google Maps.
  • When uploading pictures I always start with google maps and browse the area I took picture in. For many businesses like banks pharmacy’s and grocery stores, there are often more than the main business that needs a photo. If there is a pharmacy, RedBox video rental, MoneyGram, ATM listed inside those stores I also use the same storefront pictures for those. This provides any maps users with a way of better identifying where those are actually located.
  • I systematically move though the areas in Google Maps I have pictures of and pick all the locations the pictures I have are relevant to and drag and drop them (one or more) from the open image viewer into the upload box in Maps. I also always have 3-4 tabs open as it takes several seconds to upload any picture (in one tab) and I can then immediately move on with the next upload in the next tab.
  • A lot of the time you will not see the businesses you have picture of represented where they should be on the map and you will have to do a quick search to find them (typically in the middle of the parking lot or across the street) and then upload your picture. If there were an efficient way of editing the business locations at the same time as doing an upload there would be thousands more businesses in my area with a correct location on the map.

Using this method I can usually upload 100-200 images per hour, but it is far from an efficient workflow and I really hope Google comes up with a better way of bulk uploading high quality content. With Google’s AI image analysis technology they should be able to auto match any image (or big batch of them) containing an embedded GPS coordinate to a business and just have the user confirm the match.

 

Here is a sample of some pictures that has gotten a good number of views:

ToGuides.jpg

I have also taken a lot of photosphere images and posted them, but they almost never gets chosen as the primary image, so I have largely given up on uploading or taking those (recently it seems like this may have changed somewhat). I now only typically upload photospheres for parks, viewpoints and larger venues.

 

My other gripe with Google Maps is that when you have uploaded many thousand pictures there is no practical way of seeing any of your older uploads (and how many views they have) as you have to scroll through endless screens a few pictures at a time back in history. I would love it if I could select a location on the map and see my pictures connected to it (and their view count).

 

I have now reached the point that I have covered all or most of my entire local area (Orange County, CA) and any further big bumps to my points or view count would be impractical to achieve without a lot of effort.

My pictures will still be available on Maps and they are collecting almost 1mill views a day, so I feel good about my contribution as a local guide and to my local community.

 

I would recommend to the local guides team to work with, recognize and encourage their high quality/volume contributors if Google Maps is going to move past experimenting in the social/community concepts and have people care about the community that is being built. My contributions may not fall into this category at the scale Google operates, but I thought I would share my experience with the Local Guides program. I will continue to occasionally contribute, but not at the volumes I have previously done.

 

Thanks.

SveinR.

 

Here are some samples of images that have gotten a lot of views (100.000+):

2016-08-30 Stors 055.JPGIMG_0473.JPGIMG_1202.JPGIMG_3230.JPGIMG_4563.JPGIMG_4696.JPGIMG_9617.JPGIMG_9662.JPG

216 comments
Connect Moderator

Re: What I have learned by posting 10600+ photos, earning 8300+ points and getting 130+ million view

@Svein wow! What an experience... 

Thanks for your share.. 

We should Follow you & Your contribution....  

salute Bro...... 

Former Google Contributor

Re: What I have learned by posting 10600+ photos, earning 8300+ points and getting 130+ million view

@Svein Wow, what an insightful and well researched post that I know many Local Guides will find very helpful. Thank you for taking the time to share this with the community!

 

This is the kind of content we like to feature. Would you mind adding a relevant photo to the post so it looks good in our site navigation if and when we feature it?

 

As a Level 5 you may get access to early features and have the opportunity to give feedback on different aspects of the product and program directly to Google. Hopefully you will find other elements of the Local Guides program to stick around for. 

Level 9
Level 9

Re: What I have learned by posting 10600+ photos, earning 8300+ points and getting 130+ million view

Interesting points, I hope this one is noticed because it's so true:

 


@Svein wrote:

My other gripe with Google Maps is that when you have uploaded many thousand pictures there is no practical way of seeing any of your older uploads (and how many views they have) as you have to scroll through endless screens a few pictures at a time back in history.


 Svein, you should be able to scroll through your photos faster via https://get.google.com/u/0/albumarchive/108148696520494170138 though you won't see view counts

Level 9

Re: What I have learned by posting 10600+ photos, earning 8300+ points and getting 130+ million view

I have added some sample images.

-Thanks

Level 8

Re: What I have learned by posting 10600+ photos, earning 8300+ points and getting 130+ million view

Incredible! So happy to see other people who are here for the quality contributions and making the product better for everyone, and not just points, levels and perks!

Way to go!

Level 8

Re: What I have learned by posting 10600+ photos, earning 8300+ points and getting 130+ million view

This is amazing. The quality of your content, not only the photos is outstanding. Congratulations and thanks for contributing. You got a new fan from Mexico, thanks for all the tips!

Luis Hernández - Querétaro, México. Queretaro Local Guides
Level 7

Re: What I have learned by posting 10600+ photos, earning 8300+ points and getting 130+ million view

Amazing man.  Your pictures are beautiful, keep it up.

Level 10

Re: What I have learned by posting 10600+ photos, earning 8300+ points and getting 130+ million view

Hi @Svein

 

Firstly congratulations on your huge achievement and >130million viewcount, that's amazing. 

 

I can fully understand your motivation, and also the sheer amount of time and effort you have spent on the road, out there taking photos, and the exponentially more time organizing it and uploading. I myself have hit 8000+ photos and >80million views. Whilst the uploading tools have improved over time (thank you android Google Maps team), but it still takes up a shocking amount of time. One can easily spend hours on the road and then at home uploading. I have of course myself developed my own routine and procedure for uploading 100, 200 photos in a day, but it still is an tiring process.

 

Sometimes I think I am too obsessed over it, but it's good to see that I am not the only one in the world with this level of dedication specifically to the photo submission portion of local guides. 😃

 

If you'll like to discuss more details privately, feel free to connect with me on email or hangouts.

 

Cheers,

 

-

Julien

https://plus.google.com/+JulienHo

 

Follow Instagram & Twitter @jhender. SG updates at #singaporelocalguides. YouTube Fun with Maps
Level 8

Betreff: What I have learned by posting 10600+ photos, earning 8300+ points and getting 130+ million

what a great report. thx