Google Business Profile Photos: Which Ones Actually Get Used

You set a cover photo. A week later you search your own business and something else is showing, usually a customer's blurry one taken at an angle you would not have chosen.

This is not a bug, and it is written into Google's own guidance in a line most people have never read.

Their help page says that if your chosen cover photo is low quality or is not the best representation, a user-submitted photo may be selected instead.

They also note plainly that the cover photo may not always appear as the first image.

So the setting is a preference, not an instruction. Which changes the job: it is not enough to upload a photo you like, it has to be good enough that Google prefers it to the ones your customers took.

Worth separating, because people upload everything into one pile.

• The logo, which Google says helps customers recognise your business, and which gets highlighted alongside your basic information like phone number and hours
• The cover photo, which sits at the top of the profile and is the one Google may overrule
• Business photos, the rest, which show features of the business and do the actual persuading

These are the ones worth having written down somewhere.

• Format: JPG or PNG
• File size: between 10 KB and 5 MB
• Recommended resolution: 720 pixels tall by 720 wide
• Minimum resolution: 250 by 250
• Video: up to 30 seconds, up to 75 MB, 720p or higher

A modern phone clears all of this without trying. The usual failure is the opposite problem: a photo that has been through three apps and arrives over 5 MB, or a logo exported at 180 pixels from an old email signature.

The guidance is short. Photos should be in focus and well lit, and they should represent reality. Google warns specifically against significant alterations and excessive use of filters.

That last part catches people. The temptation with a finished kitchen or a valeted car is to push the saturation until it looks like a brochure, and the result is both against the guidance and worse at its job.

A customer comparing three builders is trying to work out what you would actually deliver. A photo that looks edited reads as a photo hiding something. Well lit and honest beats processed every time, and it is also the thing Google asks for.

You can request the removal of customer-added photos, and businesses occasionally go looking for that option the moment an unflattering one appears.

Usually the better answer is to drown it rather than fight it. A profile with four owner photos and one bad customer shot has a problem. A profile with forty good owner photos has a customer photo somewhere in it.

Removal is worth pursuing for something genuinely wrong, a photo of the wrong business or something that breaches the content policy. For a merely unflattering one, more and better of your own does more.

For a trade or a local service, the useful list is shorter than people expect and it is mostly not the finished job.

• Finished work, obviously, several angles, in daylight
• The van, clean, with the signwriting legible. It is the thing turning up outside their house
• You and the team, faces visible. People are letting you into their home
• The work actually happening, with dust sheets down and the place tidy
• Certificates, accreditations and insurance documents, photographed straight
• The premises if you have any, including the sign, which also helps with the storefront question

One practical thing that saves a panic. Uploads do not appear instantly. Google says media shows to customers once it is live, that pending media does not show, and that this can take 24 to 48 hours.

If something is flagged as violating policy it is marked not approved and will not appear on Search or Maps at all, which is a different situation from simply waiting.

So upload, leave it two days, then look. Re-uploading the same photo three times because it has not appeared yet is the most common way people end up with a profile full of duplicates.