Google Maps allows users to tag restaurant food pics

People who love taking photos of their food at restaurants before they dig in will love Google's newest feature for Maps.

Google Map's newest features allows users to tag photos of food to restaurant locations.

People who love taking photos of their food at restaurants before they dig in will love Google's newest feature for Maps.

The feature will apparently alert users when Maps finds a newly captured photo taken at a food-related place on their device, and offer to attach that photo to a location for others to see, according to Android Police.

The feature called "Photo Notifications" is on an early rollout available only to high-ranking members of Google Maps' 'Local Guides' community.

A Google help page already describes the feature: "These notifications show up after you've taken a photo in public places that Google thinks are interesting to other people, like restaurants and bars. To get these notifications, you need Location History turned on.'

The Location History requirement suggests the Maps app is just doing a simple GPS lookup, and if the location data embedded in a photo matches a place, it will spawn a notification.

The photos Google Maps is asking for will end up in the public 'Places' database of Google Maps - a collection of Zomato-style reviews and pictures submitted by users.

This is not the first time Google Maps has tried to get more data on places from users. The app will often prompt users to rate a place they've been to but this has always been in-line, in a Places card, and easy to scroll past.

The use of an Android notification is a much more aggressive form of data acquisition.

It's unclear if or when the feature is going to move past the early rollout stage and become available to the entire Google Maps user base.