Google Business Profile photos, category by category

Photos are the first thing a searcher looks at on your listing and one of the last things most owners maintain. The usual state is four images uploaded when the listing was created, a logo slot that is empty, and a set of customer photos taken on a bad day that now represent your business.

The categories, and what belongs in each

Logo

A single image, square, with your mark centred and room around it. Google crops it, sometimes to a circle, so anything near the edge is at risk. This slot is empty on a surprising number of listings and takes two minutes to fill.

Cover

The image you want leading your listing. Landscape, high resolution, and representative — the storefront, the workshop, the dining room. Setting a cover tells Google your preference; it does not guarantee which photo appears first, because Google may lead with something else it thinks performs better.

Exterior

What the building looks like from the street, from the direction customers approach. This is a practical wayfinding photo more than a marketing one: people use it to confirm they have arrived. Two or three angles, including one that shows your signage clearly, and ideally one at night if you open in the evening.

Interior

Inside the space, well lit, on a normal day rather than after a deep clean. Interiors answer questions people will not ask: is it clean, is it busy, will I feel out of place, is there room to wait.

Team

The people who do the work. These consistently outperform expectations, particularly for trades and services where trust is the deciding factor. They do not need to be studio portraits — someone mid-job, in the actual work, reads better than a posed headshot.

Product

What you sell or the work you finished. For a restaurant, the dishes. For a trade, before and after shots. For a retailer, what is actually on the shelves this season.

How many, and how recent

Five of your own photos is a floor, not a target. Fifteen to twenty across the categories is a reasonable working number for most businesses.

Freshness matters at least as much as count, and gets ignored. A listing with forty photos, newest uploaded two years ago, reads as an abandoned business to anyone paying attention. One with twelve photos where the newest is from last month reads as open and active. Add something monthly — finished work, a seasonal display, a new team member — and the problem solves itself.

The Growbiz audit warns when your newest upload passes 90 days, which is roughly where "current" stops being true.

Practical quality notes

• Light beats equipment. A recent phone in good natural light outperforms an expensive camera indoors under fluorescents. Shoot interiors mid-morning near windows.
• Landscape for cover, both for the rest. Google crops differently in different surfaces; a subject centred with breathing room survives every crop.
• No text overlays, borders or watermarks. They look like ads, Google discourages them, and they can get an image rejected.
• No stock photography. People recognise it instantly, and it actively undermines trust because it implies you had nothing real to show.
• Keep the file reasonable. Large enough to look sharp, not a 12MB original.

Customer photos, which you do not control

Customers upload photos to your listing and they appear alongside yours. You cannot delete them. You can flag one that violates Google's policies — offensive, irrelevant, not actually your business — and Google decides, often slowly and often not in your favour.

The workable response is volume and recency. Customer photos and owner photos share the same space, so a steady stream of good current images from you shifts what people see without removing anything.

Growbiz separates your media from customer-contributed media in the interface, keeps Google's required attribution on customer photos, and only lets you delete what you actually own — because the alternative is an error from Google and a confusing failure.

Video

Short videos are supported: up to 30 seconds, 100MB, 720p or better. Very few businesses upload any, which is precisely why a 20-second clip of your workspace or a job being done stands out. It does not need production value. It needs to be real and steady.

A first pass, in about an hour

1. Upload a logo, properly square. Two minutes.
2. Shoot the exterior from the street, from two directions, with signage visible.
3. Shoot three or four interiors mid-morning near the windows.
4. Photograph whoever is working today, doing the actual work.
5. Photograph the last three jobs you finished or the products currently in stock.
6. Pick the best landscape shot as the cover.
7. Put a monthly reminder in your calendar to add one photo. That reminder is the whole maintenance plan.

If you are already writing Business posts, the photo you take for a post belongs on the listing too. One shoot, two freshness signals.