Throughout this tutorial, you will find four workflow-stories. Here you will find inspiration on how to organize and structure your photo walks as a Google Maps photographer. The aim of these particular photo walks was to collect a set of sample images to be used in this tutorial. The result was 250 images that you will soon become quite familiar with.

January 15, 2020, was an overcast and dark day, which allowed the warm yellow light to shine from inside many of the shops I photographed. Lots of soft light and warm colors compared to a day with hard sunlight. A bit of rain resulted in some nice reflections coming from the pavement. I was out shooting for two hours from 9:30 until 11:30 in the morning.

After dropping off my wife at work, I decided to cover two high streets nearby north of Copenhagen in Denmark. I knew there would be lots of stores close to each other, so walking would be easy. And this early in the day, there would not be a lot of people around.

I used my Huawei P30 Pro camera phone with color vibrancy set to Leica Smooth. It has a pretty good camera. It can capture great images even in darkness and it has a super wide-angle lens that often comes in handy.

Below you can see the trail of places I photographed in the high streets of Lyngby and Ordrup.

I tried to be consistent in first shooting all the storefronts on one side of the street, and then shoot the other side when walking back to my car. I did deviate from this as some very wide storefront were easier to frame from a distance. Since I knew the area well, this would not be a problem later when finding the shops on Google Maps. But when shooting in a less well-known area or in an area where a lot of the store would need to be added to the map, I strictly stick to the one-side-strategy.

Another strategy is to take only one pic of each storefront. If I take more than one, I always try to delete the extras immediately. This can save time later while processing and uploading the images. Further, on sunny days you might only be able to shoot one side of the road before noon and the other in the afternoon. It takes some serious planning skills to have perfect sunlight on both sides on a photo walk on a sunny day.

Feel free to visit and explore Lyngby High street or Ordrup High street in Street View on Google Maps.

You can find the 250 unprocessed images in this Google Photo album.

Other Workflow stories include Processing, Uploading, and Feedback.