Short answer
Photos of your own vans, your team and your finished work do the most. Stock images do nothing and quietly signal that you might not be real. Add a few every month rather than twenty once, because recent activity matters more than volume.
Photos are the part of a Google Business Profile most plumbers either ignore completely or fill with stock images. Both are a waste, because this is one of the few places a customer forms an opinion about you before they ring.
What people actually look at
When somebody is choosing between three plumbers on a map, photos answer the question they cannot ask: is this a real business or a call centre that will subcontract my job out?
That means the useful photos are the ones that prove you exist and do the work:
- Your vans. Signwritten, parked at a real job. This is the single most reassuring image you can have.
- You and your team. Faces, in work clothes, on site. Not a studio portrait.
- Finished work. The new cylinder, the tidy pipework, the bathroom. Properly lit, straight.
- Work in progress. The floor lifted, the drain camera on screen. People find this more convincing than the finished shot because it is obviously real.
What to leave out
Stock photos. Every plumbing listing has the same ones. A customer who has looked at three profiles has seen your photo twice already.
Logos as photos. The logo belongs in the logo slot, not the gallery.
Blurry phone shots of nothing. A dark picture of a pipe means nothing to somebody who does not know what they are looking at.
Anything with a customer’s house identifiable unless they are happy about it. Inside of a house, number on the door, car on the drive. Ask first.
How often, and why that matters
A few every month beats a hundred in one go.
Recency is a signal. A profile with photos from last week looks like a working business. A profile with forty photos from 2022 looks abandoned, even though it has more content. Google notices the difference and so does the person reading it.
The practical version: take two or three photos on a job you are pleased with, and upload them when you are back in the van. That is enough.
The myth worth killing
Geotagging. Every few months somebody sells trades a service that adds location data to photos, claiming it helps you rank in that suburb.
It does not. Google strips that data from uploads and has confirmed as much repeatedly. If somebody is charging you for it, that is a reasonable signal to check what else they are charging for.
If you want to rank in a suburb you are not based in, the answer is a real page about that area on your website, not metadata in a photo.
Where photos fit in the bigger picture
Photos will not drag you into the map on their own. Categories, service areas, proximity and reviews do the heavy lifting there.
What photos do is convert the people who already found you. Two plumbers side by side with similar ratings, one with real photos of real work and one with stock images, is not a close contest.
That is why photos are part of the monthly profile work here rather than a one off setup task. The profile is not a form you fill in once, it is the thing deciding whether somebody rings you or the next one down.