no google, I don’t like that!

In the wake of my previous post, I was checking out some of the photos on Google maps of Sydney Road, one of my photos came up first, which was nice, but then I started navigating around the nearby photos… they were all crappy photos of a shoe store!

I probably missed this addition, but I’d always thought that photos only came from two sources – Panoramio or geotagged Flickr, which meant that there was a reasonably high quality – a natural filter if you like. Now it seems that a business owner or anyone else who adds photos to a Google Place page, gets them added to the maps interface.

Frankly, that’s crap! At least allow the user to filter them out. I often use this feature to explore an area of interest, I don’t want some retailer’s happy snaps of their shop diluting the experience!