Google Maps Photo Contributions

Status: dormant. Data never pulled.

What this was

Photos uploaded to places over a long stretch of time. Google reports a view count per photo, and some of them have numbers on them that are wildly out of proportion to anything I did.

Same instinct as the YouTube clips: the ones I thought were good and the ones that got views are not obviously the same set. If that holds up across two completely unrelated platforms, it's worth more than either one on its own.

The question

What actually drives views on a Maps photo? The candidates are mostly not about the photo:

• How much foot traffic the place gets
• How few other photos that place has
• Whether it's the first photo, or the thumbnail
• Whether the place is a business people check before going

If those dominate, then photo quality is close to irrelevant and this is a placement game, not a craft game. That would be a clean contrast with LinkedIn, where the content clearly does matter some.

Getting the data

There's no API for contribution stats. Options, roughly in order of how much I'd have to do by hand:

• The Maps contributions page lists photos with view counts — scrapeable from a logged-in session, tedious but real
• Google Takeout exports Maps contributions, though the view counts are the part I'd need to confirm actually come through
• Manual transcription for the top N photos, which is probably enough to see whether the pattern is real

Whichever way, the per-photo fields I want alongside views are: place type, city, how many other photos that place already had, and my own rating of the photo.

To fill in

• Which account, and roughly when this started
• Whether Takeout carries the view counts
• Is this Maps contributions only, or does the Google Photos side belong here too