Google Business Profile Photo Sizes

The Google Business Profile Photo Size Table

Three limits govern all of it. Photos upload as JPG or PNG, the file has to land between 10 KB and 5 MB, and Google's stated minimum is 250 px on each side with 720 px on each side recommended. Anything under the minimum gets refused. Anything wildly over gets resized on Google's terms rather than yours.

So the practical target is a file about 1200 px on its long edge, saved as a JPG under a couple of megabytes, cropped to the shape of the slot before it leaves your computer. Crop it yourself and you decide what stays in frame. Push a tall phone photo into a 16:9 slot and a machine decides, usually by cutting the top and the bottom off whatever you were photographing.

Which Photo Slots Customers Actually Look At

Owners spend the most effort on the logo and the cover photo, which is close to backwards.

The cover photo is a request. Google reads it as your preference, then shows whichever image it judges best for the search and the person running it, which is often a customer's photo or one of your job shots. Setting the cover is worth two minutes and worth no argument.

What customers stop on, roughly in order:

• The exterior shot. Somebody working out whether they can find you wants the building from the road, in daylight, with the sign readable. For a business with no storefront, the marked truck does this job.
• Work in progress and finished work. The strongest photos on any trade listing. A crew on a roof, a panel with the cover off, a yard before and after. These read as proof.
• Faces. A homeowner deciding who to let inside looks for the people. Two or three real photographs of the crew beat a stock image every time.
• The interior. Waiting room, shop floor, service bay. It answers what happens when I get there.
• The logo. Recognition, once somebody already knows the name.

Count matters less than recency and range. A dozen genuine images covering the outside, the inside, the crew, and the work carry more weight with a reader than sixty near duplicates of one storefront.

What Gets a Profile Photo Rejected, Cropped, or Ignored

• Under 10 KB or under 250 px. A logo pulled off an old business card usually fails right here.
• Heavy filters, borders, and pasted on text. Google asks for the place as it looks. Phone numbers and offers baked into an image are the fastest way to have it dropped.
• Stock photography. A generic picture of somebody else's kitchen adds nothing, and a reader spots it in a second.
• Screenshots and marketing graphics. Those belong on a website. On a listing they read as filler.
• The wrong aspect ratio. A vertical phone photo in a landscape slot gets center cropped, which is how the sign ends up out of frame.
• Blur and dusk. Shoot in daylight, hold still, wipe the lens. Most bad listing photos are bad for those three reasons.

One myth worth putting down. Geotagging a photo, or stuffing a place name into the file name, does nothing for a map position. Google strips that metadata on upload. Photos help a listing by keeping it active and by convincing the person reading it, and that's a different mechanism from a ranking signal.

A Photo Routine That Keeps a Listing Looking Open

Photos age. A gallery whose newest image is two years old reads as a business that may have closed, and that impression costs calls whatever the rankings say.

A routine that holds up without turning into a chore:

• Take the photograph while the job is still standing in front of you, on the phone already in your pocket. Nobody goes back later.
• Get one shot a week into a folder on that phone. Twelve usable images a quarter come out of it with no effort.
• Upload a few at a time. A steady trickle reads as activity, and one dump of forty reads as a launch.
• Refresh the exterior shot whenever something visible changes. New sign, new paint, new truck, new bay door.
• Watch what customers upload. Their photos stay, and yours can outnumber them.

That cadence is one piece of what we run monthly on a client's listing, and the season decides the subject matter more than a calendar does. Storm work photographs in the spring. Holiday hours and a lit storefront once the decorations go up. A full yard of equipment ahead of the summer stretch when every crew in the county is booked out. Google Business Profile management covers the whole cycle, and review management covers the other half of what a card shows a stranger.