01-12-2017 01:04 PM - edited 03-30-2017 04:28 PM
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:
The images that included the following was rarely chosen:
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.
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).
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:
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:
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+):
01-12-2017 01:26 PM
@Svein wow! What an experience...
Thanks for your share..
We should Follow you & Your contribution....
salute Bro......
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01-12-2017 01:34 PM - edited 01-12-2017 01:41 PM
@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.
01-12-2017 02:22 PM
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
01-12-2017 10:17 PM - edited 01-12-2017 10:18 PM
I have added some sample images.
-Thanks
01-12-2017 10:48 PM
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!
01-13-2017 12:33 AM
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!
01-14-2017 12:07 AM
Amazing man. Your pictures are beautiful, keep it up.
01-14-2017 01:46 AM
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
01-14-2017 09:00 AM
what a great report. thx