Hi Aaron & everyone else, please can you make this make sense? Saw this popup yesterday, 3pp - Catwick - Wikipedia, reported via helpchat (ticket 36003558), gave them the evidence, location of the wayspot etc, got the standard “doesn’t meet removal criteria, sorry not doing anything about it” response.
Okay Niantic, you win, your logic makes perfect sense.
Churches are usually eligible, so that most likely is why the Wayspot wasn’t removed. What you may need to do is take a new photo and upload that, and once it has been accepted request that the 3rd party photo be removed. This is typically the route that is taken if a Wayspot has an ineligible image, but the Wayspot itself is eligible. You can request photo removals via help chat on the Wayfarer website.
Keep in mind that ML doesn’t catch everything wrong with a nomination, and the community may not do their due diligence to see if this is a 3rd party image. Mistakes do happen, but there are ways to correct them.
well I can’t take a new photo, I don’t live anywhere near Hull and I’m not travelling there for it either 
As for requesting photo removal… yeah I did that, I did exactly that, that’s what doesn’t meet removal criteria either.
Unfortunately, that’s what would need to be done here. The Wayspot itself doesn’t meet removal criteria, so a new photo would need to be taken and uploaded before the current 3rd party photo can be removed.
I have tried to remove ineligible photos from valid Wayspots that only have 1 photo, and they are never accepted. All Wayspots, with the exception of imports, need to have a photo, and no ineligible photos will be removed until a replacement has been uploaded.
I’m happy to settle for a photo-less wayspot, if the wayspot itself meets acceptance criteria, church easy 5* etc, no problem with me leaving the wayspot blank, it just makes my brain hurt when the logic behind it is ‘yeah this is fine, despite the fact we’ve been given evidence to the contrary’
I’ve also had this experience. Niantic seems to prefer having a rule breaking photo over not having a photo, even though they absolutely can have wayspots without photos as they have shown with the imports they’ve done over the years.
I think maybe something needs to change with this train of thought. I’d rather see a wayspot with no photo than one with a photo that breaks the rules. At least if the wayspot no longer has a photo, it encourages other local people to go and submit a new one, whereas if the rule breaking one is kept, people may not even pay attention to the fact it is rule breaking and may not be encouraged to submit an eligible photo.
Worse is the fact its on the showcase for everyone to see hey look at this great wayspot with its stolen photo, amazing
Surely an easy fix for Niantic would be if they replaced it with a default image with text something like “No Suitable Image, Please Upload Your Own”.
Yes, I think there could be a place holder image created for cases like this, instead of relying on someone to upload a new image and then maybe request removal of any ineligible ones. It’s a great suggestion, and I’d rather see something like the game logo with text to encourage uploading a new photo, which could make this process a bit easier, especially if you live nowhere near the Wayspot with the problem image.
