The photo gallery on your Google listing is not entirely yours.

Most owners assume the photos on their listing are the ones they uploaded.

They are not, quite.

Customers can add photos too

Both you and your customers can add photos to a Business Profile. Usually this is a gift, since a photograph taken by somebody who was genuinely there is more persuasive than anything you could stage.

Occasionally it is not, and this is where the asymmetry bites. Google's documentation says an owner can request to remove customer-added photos. Request, not delete.

If that sounds familiar, it is the same shape as the review situation: content about your business, posted by somebody else, removable only by asking. There is also a documented route for reporting photos or videos that are inappropriate rather than merely unflattering, and the distinction between those two matters, because only one of them is a policy question.

Two different jobs, two different routes

Removing a photo you uploaded yourself is straightforward and immediate. Find your business on Search or Maps, open Photos, select the one you want gone, and delete it.

Removing somebody else's is a different mechanism entirely, and this is where people lose an afternoon. There is no delete button on a customer's photo, because it is not yours. You are asking Google to take it down, and the outcome is theirs to decide.

Which makes the framing of the request the whole job. A photo that is merely unflattering, showing your shop on a bad day or a job mid-mess, is not a policy violation and asking as though it were will get you nowhere. A photo that is genuinely inappropriate, or of the wrong business entirely, is a different request with a different route and a much better chance.

The specs nobody checks

Worth having to hand, because most upload failures are one of these. Photos need to be JPG or PNG, between 10 KB and 5 MB. Google recommends 720 by 720 pixels, with 250 by 250 the minimum.

A modern phone clears all of that comfortably, which is worth knowing because the failures are almost never photographs. They are logos saved in the wrong format, screenshots somebody compressed to nothing, or an image exported at a size that made sense for an email signature and nowhere else. If an upload keeps refusing, check the file before you blame the profile.

The rule your polished images may fail

Google asks that photos be in focus and well lit, and have no significant alterations or excessive use of filters, on the basis that they should represent the business accurately.

Read it again before you upload the heavily graded shot your designer produced.

On generated imagery specifically, this guidance says nothing at all, so anyone telling you Google bans it is filling in a blank. What the guidance does say is that the photo should accurately represent the business, which is a standard worth applying yourself regardless of what is enforced.

What actually works

Photographs of jobs you actually did, taken on a phone, in ordinary light. The van outside a real house. The finished bathroom before anyone tidied it beyond recognition.

They outperform staged imagery for the same reason a specific review outperforms a general one: they are checkable. It is the same argument that decides what belongs on a service page, and the same photos do both jobs.

If there is a photo on your listing you did not put there and would rather remove, book a strategy call. Knowing whether it is a removal request or a policy report is most of the work.