Our motivation for the photos--just like the reviews and 'more info' options--is about creating a greater sense of place. This role is expressed in your use of 'pleasant', as in 'it was pleasant to see what this place is like.' Our testing shows that photos often mean helpful, reassuring, and most of all, confirming, as in "Yes, that's the place I was remembering -- I'd forgotten that they had a big sun face over the espresso machine. That's the one I want to go to."

Of course, some photos do help identify locations by showing buildings in context, but that is just one of their uses.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=apple+store,+5th+ave,+nyc&layer=&ie=UTF8&z=12&ll=40.798477,-73.955154&spn=0.130209,0.234489&om=1&iwloc=A

When the highlighted photo and the details gallery of related photos bring a more powerful Genus Loci to users, then we've been successful not simply in making a better map, but in making maps more useful and thereby better fulfilling our mission to geographically organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

These databases are big and take a while to update, but maybe not so long as you suggest. While the intervals vary, they trend smaller even as the scale of the updates trends larger. This is a battle between more and better computers, faster networking, and similar Moore's Law factors on one side, and more data, greater resolution, and richer data types on the other. In this fight, time seems to be on the side of reduced intervals between updates, but the progression from text to images and beyond keeps the scales somewhat in balance.