Not centered

D305 Only centered images can survive Googles auto-crop

This page aims to illustrate why you need to always center the places in your shots for Google Maps.

If you upload this nice photo of the sculpture of Martin Andersen Nexø staring into the distance you will get in trouble. Google often shows our photos in a square format. And the auto-crop does not know that the interesting part of your image is off to the right like in this image.

Hence Googles auto-crop will produce and show this image. It is now a completely worthless photo of a random hedge.

Instead, if you upload this image where the sculpture is centered you ill be fine.

Now, Googles auto-crop will produce this perfect square version, that will represent the statue very well. You have to predict what Googles (stupid) auto-crop will do and prepare your images so they can survive to be auto-cropped.

Here is another example.

Notice, how the name of this bar got wrecked by Google's auto-crop.

Notice, how the name of this bar got wrecked by Googles auto-crop.

But after auto-crop, it is clear that the storefront is off to the right. Also, zooming in further would be better. Preferably as tight as possible and with the same margin to the two orange signs on each side. So viewers don't get distracted by the pipes and the black facade to the left.

This is what I wanted the auto-crop to end up with. I think this is perfect.

To reach the perfect square result after auto-crop I needed in total about 10 attempts before I got it right in my photo editing software. Notice, how the height of the wide image determines the width of the auto-cropped image. And getting the centering perfect also took a few attempts. This process is explained in more detail here and here and you can find very detailed explanations in the video Six cropping steps.

How to prevent this issue

Remember to have amble cropping space on BOTH sides.

When you crop your photos before uploading you can see and compensate by removing some of the cropping on the side you need the storefront to move towards to be perfectly centered.

Making perfectly centered images takes time. And not all local guides want to spend so much time to crop their photos before uploading them to Google Maps.

The next issue is about uploading only super-sharp images. Just hit "Suggested next page" to learn more.

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