New Google Maps notification asks for your restaurant food photos

We've all done it before: you're at a restaurant, your meal has just arrived, and it looks so delicious that you must take a picture. Usually that image ends up being posted on social media or sent to a friend, but there's another app that would love your food photos: Google Maps. According to Android Police, a Google Maps feature will pop up a notification asking the user to upload a recent photo.

The info reportedly sent out to users calls the feature "Photo Notifications." For now, this addition is on an "early rollout" to high-ranking members of the Google Maps "Local Guides" community. The picture shows the Android version of the Google Maps spawning a system notification asking if a user would like to upload a recent photo to Google Maps.

A Google help page already describes the feature: "These notifications show up after you've taken a photo in public places that Google thinks are interesting to other people, like restaurants and bars. To get these notifications, you need Location History turned on." The Location History requirement suggests the Maps app is just doing a simple GPS lookup, and if the location data embedded in a photo matches a place, it will spawn a notification. Google Photos has a cloud-based computer vision system which can detect and tag objects like "food" in a picture, but with no Google Photos requirement, it doesn't seem like the computer vision system is in use here.