What photos actually belong on your Google Business Profile
Google's own size and quality rules, the three categories worth doing before anything else, and the mistakes that make a listing look worse than no photos at all.
Open your own listing and look at it the way a stranger would. If the photo grid is empty, or it is one dark picture of a shutter taken years ago, that is the whole impression a new customer gets before they have read a single word about you. The shop next door, with twenty ordinary photos taken on a phone, looks more real, more open and more trustworthy than yours — not because it is a better shop, but because a blank grid reads as a business nobody is minding.
This is one of the cheapest things on a Google listing to fix, and one of the most commonly ignored, because nobody tells a shop owner what actually belongs there.
What Google actually requires, technically
The rules are narrow and worth knowing before you upload anything. Photos need to be JPG or PNG, between 10 KB and 5 MB, with a recommended size of 720 by 720 pixels and a minimum of 250 by 250.
Google also asks for photos that are in focus, reasonably well lit, and not heavily edited or filtered — the same standard as an honest phone photo taken in daylight, nothing more technical than that. One detail that catches new listings out: photos and videos only appear on Google once the profile itself has been verified. Uploading a full gallery to an unverified listing means none of it is visible yet.
Three categories, before anything else
If you do nothing else, do these three. Three of each is enough to move a listing from empty to credible.
- Exterior. The shopfront with the signage readable, taken from the street, ideally from a couple of different angles or times of day. This is what tells someone walking past that they have found the right place.
- Interior. The inside as a customer actually sees it — the layout, the counter, the space. Someone deciding whether to walk in is picturing what is on the other side of the door.
- What you actually sell, or who does the work. Stock, product, the counter mid-transaction, or a photo of you or your staff. This is the category most listings skip entirely, and it is the one that does the most to separate a real business from a placeholder.
Beyond those nine, more helps, but these three categories are the floor.
What makes a photo worse than no photo
A stock image. A generic photo of a smiling shopkeeper who is not you, or a product shot lifted from a supplier's catalogue, tells a careful customer that the profile is not being run by the actual business. It looks worse than an honest, slightly imperfect phone photo.
Heavy filters or an obvious edit. Google says plainly it wants photos without significant alterations, and a customer reacts to an over-processed photo the same way — it reads as staged rather than shown.
A screenshot, a flyer, or a photo with text and logos baked into it. These were made for a different purpose, usually a WhatsApp broadcast or a printed poster, and they look out of place sitting next to a phone photo of your shopfront. The profile picture already carries your logo — the gallery does not need it repeated on every image.
One photo, never updated. A listing that has looked the same for three years signals a business that is not paying attention to anything else on the profile either, hours and phone number included.
What to do this week
- Open your own listing in a private browser window and look at the photo grid as a stranger would.
- Take three exterior photos, three interior, and three of your stock or your work, in daylight, on a phone.
- Remove anything that is a stock image, a flyer, or a screenshot.
- Add one new photo the next time anything genuinely changes — new stock, a renovation, a festival display — rather than treating this as a once-only job.
That is an afternoon, and it costs nothing but the time. If you would rather have the whole listing looked at and fixed properly — categories, hours, name and address matching, and the photos — that is what the Google listing service is, ₹4,999, once, with the login registered in your name from day one.
And if you want to see everything that is actually wrong before deciding what to fix first, the free scan on the front page checks your listing, your site and how easy you are to contact, and hands you the list. It takes about a minute and there is no signup. For the rest of what makes a listing disappear or reappear on Google Maps, this is the fuller list.
Written by Shyam Patra, who runs Orderzone from Kolkata. If something here is wrong or out of date, tell me and I will fix it — the date at the top changes when I do.