The Image Gallery, found at https://localviking.com/gallery, houses all of your locally uploaded images (over the last 10 months) and also allows you to upload images directly:

You can drag & drop images in or select them from your local drive.

The Image Gallery allows you to upload an image once and optimize + publish it across any number of locations, on the schedule that you choose.

** NOTE **

Currently you still must publish and optimize images in a single step. Within in the next 1-2 weeks the optimization process will be fully stand alone and you can use the image gallery to optimize images and download them from S3 for use in your SEO campaign(s).

You can remove an image from the gallery at any point in time by selecting the image and clicking the 'delete' button:

Deleting an image that is scheduled to be published will only remove the image from the gallery -- the scheduled publication of the image will continue as usual.

Once an image is uploaded to Local Viking, you'll be able to schedule it on the location level (via any location's media tab):

as well as directly in the gallery by selecting the images you'd like to publish and clicking 'schedule':

The scheduling sidebar allows you to select everything you'll need to publish your selected images.

The first item you will select is the 'category' of the photo. Please note that you will need to only select valid categories for the location(s) that you are publishing to. The Google My Business API does not include location <=> category specific mapping so if you are not publishing photos to 'restaurant' category or sub category GMBs, don't select 'food' or 'menu' photo categories.

If you accidentally select a category that is not supported by a GMB, we'll automatically fallback and add the photo to a category the listing does support.

Next, you'll select the location(s) that you want to publish the selected photos to. You can select locations individually or use location tags to easiliy publish to multiple locations.

Configure the scheduling of your photos by choosing a start date, selecting the duration of the schedule and checking whether or not you want to only publish Monday-Friday:

Local Viking will automatically spread out the publication of your images across the selected range of days.

The Image Gallery's scheduling functionality gives you the flexibility to publish images across a single or an unlimited amount of locations. Checkout some example scenarios of what you can do:

Scenario 1 (1 Image to Multiple Locations - Instant Publish) - select a single image and any number locations (and/or tags), set publishing days to '1' and select your date. The system will publish the image to each location on your selected date.

Scenario 2 (1 Image to Multiple Locations - Drip Publish) - select any number of images and any number of locations (and/or tags), set your desired number of publishing days, start date and 'business day' setting. The system will programmatically space out the publishing of the images over your selected schedule.

Scenario 3 (Multiple Images to 1 Location) - select any number of images and a location as well as your publishing settings. The system will programmatically space out the publishing of the images over your selected schedule. Ex. selecting 10 images and 20 publishing days will result in ten (random) days of publishing over the date range.

Scenario 4 (Multiple Images to Multiple Locations) - select any number of images and any number of locations (or tags) as well as your publishing settings. The system will programmatically space out the publishing of the images over your selected schedule, to your selected locations.

Before publishing images to your GMBS (and soon, as a stand alone feature), Local Viking can automate the entry of EXIF data and auto rename the file with a SEO friendly filename.

First you'll set the image's EXIF data (within the context of an image being published to a specific location) by creating and selecting an EXIF template:

Creating an EXIF template allows you to use our location variable syntax to optimize images with location specific data.

As a quick refresher on location variables, setting an EXIF template's title value as "{{ location.name }}" and using that template during a Gallery Image scheduling means that each image will have the exif title attribute set to the GMB's name when the image is published.

We upload these images to S3 and you'll be able to download them and use them in your SEO campaigns at any time.

To use an EXIF template that you have created, select 'Override with Template' and choose your template from the dropdown:

'Keep Original' means that no EXIF data is touched during processing and 'Clean all EXIF data' will result in any existing EXIF data being wiped before publication.

Finally, select 'Optimize image names for SEO' to have the system automatically rename the file at publishing time, following an internal formula:

[location name]-[random keyword from location's tracking]-[location locality]

After clicking 'schedule', you'll see your image publication timeline:

To prevent the images from going live, as well as remove all published images associated with a publication, click the 'Delete' button.

At any time you can view your scheduled images by selecting the 'publication' from the bottom nav:

--

If you have any questions, please message us via live chat or email @ support@localviking.com.