Matt J. Olsen

Well, it finally happened. I posted iPhone photos to my Flickr stream.

I honestly never thought I would. “Flickr’s for my real photographs,” I always said. “For photos that were shot RAW, put through Lightroom and Photoshop — you know, real photos.” But I forgot where I started with photography — with a cheap Canon Powershot point-and-shoot and an open mind. If it was worth sharing, I shared it. The source didn’t matter. And that’s still true.

The great thing is the camera phone is with me all the time, everywhere. Inspiration strikes sometimes when not armed to the teeth with a DSLR. For those moments, I shall bow to the convenience and genius of the camera phone. The iPhone camera is good enough that, like my old Powershot and almost any other camera, a good subject and composition can make a photo worth sharing.

And so it’s not the effort put into the photo nor the equipment used to create it that makes it a “real” photo. It’s the inspiration and the content that makes it real.

I’ve come across many folks who have encountered an error when trying to add a business to Google Places. Even though the business you’re trying to add might look like it has the correct address, such as “Jacksonville Florida 32257,” the following error is seen:

Obviously, Florida is indeed a state in the US, but Google cannot recognize it for some reason.

It seemed the only way to fix this error was to manually edit the location and select the correct state from the drop-down menu. This is acceptable, I suppose, if you’re only adding one or a few locations. However, I was encountering this error when trying to add more than 400 locations using the bulk upload and verification feature. It’s essentially a spreadsheet with multiple fields that Google reads automatically. But, it was not reading the “State” field properly, returning the error above for every single location.

So I found a solution: Simply use the state’s postal abbreviation instead if its full name. Google recognized the state names easy peasy and I’ve had zero problems. For your reference, here’s a link to the official USPS state abbreviations: LINK

Yes, it’s a shame Google has not corrected this error yet. There are help topics after help topics of folks encountering this same problem, but no response from Google that I can find. I realize Places is a consumer-level application so Google doesn’t offer support, but they need to fix this obvious error, especially when it’s affecting a large number of businesses.

I hope others with this issue come across this post and end the frustration!