If a marketing company tells you that uploading photos will move your business up the map, they are selling something. Controlled tests by local-search researchers, the people who spend their careers on this, found no measurable ranking lift from photos. Google's own ranking documentation does not mention them.
That sounds like bad news for a photography company to publish. It is the opposite.
Where ranking ends and choosing begins
Ranking gets you onto the map, one of three businesses a searcher sees. Ranking is decided by your category, your completeness, your reviews and your distance from the person searching. You can fix the first three in an afternoon; the fourth you cannot fix at all.
Then the searcher opens one of the three. This is where photos work. The analysis of Google's own data across about 580,000 images and 45,000 businesses found that profiles with a hundred or more photos received several times the calls, direction requests and website clicks of an average listing, and that profiles with a single photo received far fewer. Nothing about that is a ranking effect. It is three businesses side by side, and the one with the real photos getting the call.
Why that is better for you
A ranking hack can be copied by every competitor the week it is published. Real photographs of your actual work cannot. A pool company whose profile shows twenty finished Gilbert backyards at dusk, the crew on a gunite day, and the owner standing in front of the truck has something the company next to it on the map does not have and cannot buy from an agency. The agency can fix a category. It cannot shoot a pool.
What a good photo set looks like
Cover the sections Google gives you: exterior, interior, at work, team, product or finished job. Twenty to thirty photos to start. Add two or three a week, because a profile with a photo from this month looks like a business that is open. Landscape orientation for the profile and the website, square for the feed. No stock, ever; people can tell, and so can Google's image classifiers.
For video, the rule is Google's, not ours: thirty seconds or less, landscape, under 75 megabytes. The vertical clip that works on Reels is the wrong file for the listing, which is why every short video we deliver comes in both.
The honest sentence
Photos will not get you found. They will get you called. Fix the category and the services so you show up, and then make sure that when someone opens your listing, they see the work.
Related: Google Business Profile · Visibility Setup