Below you can see the results from posting the 250 pictures from January 15th, 2020.

For every photo, I checked manually how the Google Maps' Photo Quality Algorithm graded them. It took quite some time because I also spend time adding them to Google Photo Albums. You should also check a bunch of your photos. Learn how further down in the next module.

Here are the results of checking my 250 pics:

Cover photos

96 of the 250 photos were chosen to become the primary picture of the place. That is 38%.

Here is a link to the album with all the cover photos: COVER Jan 15, 2020 pic.

Featured photos

Another 89 of the 250 photos were featured as picture number 2-8 for the place. That is another 36%.

Here is a link to the album with features photos: FEATURED Jan 15, 2020 pics.

Accepted photos

The algorithm accepted another 48 of the 250 photos. That is 19%.

Here is a link to the album with accepted photos: ACCEPTED Jan 15, 2020 pics.

Rejected photos

The algorithm immediately rejected another 14 of the 250 photos. That is 6%.

Here is a link to the album with rejected pics: REJECTED Jan 15, 2020 pics.

The remaining 3 photos were posted to new places that are still pending. This is 1%.

So 96+89+48+14+3 = 250. When calculating these percentages, I should mention that I in fact took about 270 pictures on that day. I deleted about 10 pictures as they had people in them. I waited to take another shot but forgot to delete the first one. And sometimes my camera takes two pictures when I intend to take only one. 1-3 pics were out of focus. I removed all these and one video before doing this analysis on the remaining 250 photos.

• 38% cover photos.
• 36% featured and.
• 19% accepted.

is way better than I expected and could have hoped for. Though I never did such a systematic analysis before, I'm really surprised how positively these 250 pictures got evaluated by the algorithm. I believe the major reasons for this amazing result include:

1. The shops in this area generally had very few existing pictures on Google Maps compared to what I normally see downtown Copenhagen. Few existing pictures leave more room for my pictures to get featured or selected as the primary picture.
2. I was very lucky with the lighting on this day. Also, the weather and the early morning hours made it easier to capture storefronts without any people in the frame.
3. My camera phone is really good. It captures vibrant colors very well - a lot better than most phones. It also has an amazing wide-angle lens that I use a lot.
4. I believe my processing with cropping and enhancing brightness and contrast also contributed to this result.

One could argue that this positive result kind of proves that many of my tips on taking and processing are well optimized to please the Google Maps Algorithm for grading uploaded photos. You may not like the esthetics of these photos and the processing I do, but it seems to me that the Algorithm likes these pictures. The additional brightness and contrast I add is surely excessive (also to my taste) when viewed on a bigger screen. Real photographers would argue that I blow out all details in the sky and the lightest areas of my pictures. That is a very fair and correct critique. My defense is that this treatment is optimized for small screens where I want my pictures to stand out and attract attention between other more dull pictures with less contrast on Google Maps. Please add your comments on this here (link #soon2come). Normally I only see and process my pictures on my phone. Making this tutorial allowed me to compare my raw and processed pictures on a bigger screen. This made me realize that I need to scale back the amount of contrast that I add. I went a bit too far on this batch of 250 pictures.

This conclusion should be questioned and discussed to learn more. I welcome such discussions here (link #soon2come).

Before turning to what we can learn from what photos were rejected, I just want to add that my success rate could have been a bit higher if I had chosen to add only a single picture to each place. To one place I uploaded 10 pics to and maybe 10 places got 2 pics.

When you look at the album with rejected photos I think we can conclude:

• Signs and plaques with text are something the algorithm dislikes. I guess this is related to the efforts to prevent spam from being posted on Google Maps. Spam is likely to contain text like web addresses and product names etc. I think this is OK. I just need to stop taking these pictures. I have this bad habit of photographing the sign when a business has nothing else of significance. This can explain why 5 of the 14 pictures were rejected.
• 3 pictures don't have a clear name on the storefront. That could be the reason why they got rejected.
• 2 places are chain stores that manage their Maps listings very tightly, and somehow limit pictures shown to their professional pictures. It has always been difficult to post pictures to these. Maybe they have a service like Updateblocker from MapsLabs or people hired to flag all pics from Local Guides.
• One storefront not centered. That could be why the B'India pic got rejected.
• Regarding the remaining 4 pictures (NHC, Bachs briller, Itacho, and Cafe A) I have no clue why they were rejected. I did try to upload them again to no avail.