It's been two years since Cody first started spotting signs of Google Maps' dish recommendations for restaurant listings. Ever since, we've known food reviews and photos were coming as well as tagging, prices, and more details. Now, it looks like Maps may be gearing up to roll out one aspect of this: tagging dishes.

A new Google Maps support page explains that you'll soon be able to view photos of specific dishes on the menu in a restaurant listing, add your own pics, and report incorrect dishes. Most of these features don't appear to be live yet, but tagging your uploaded photos of dishes is. Though, to be honest, we're not sure when exactly this started showing up. It's live for me now, but it wasn't there when I uploaded my last batch of food photos to Maps, a couple of weeks ago. For all we know, some of you may have had it for weeks, possibly months, if it was being server-side tested.

Regardless of when it showed up, you'll get a new pop-up anytime you upload images in a restaurant's listing on Maps (whether from the listing itself or if you shared those pics from your gallery). You'll be asked to name each dish separately, if you're batch uploading, and the suggestions seem to be super exhaustive.

Once the name chosen, you'll get asked whether your recommend this dish and you can either give it a thumbs-up or down. There's no dedicated review per dish. A thank you message appears when you're done.

For now, there's nothing else to do or see. When you browse the restaurant's listing, the uploaded photos will show up under the From Menu tab, but they don't have any indication of the dish's name that you just added. (Some people have previously taken a habit of adding the name as a caption/comment, and those do show up still, but the new chosen names don't.)

When the feature fully rolls out, these photos will be linked back to the dish in Maps' Menu tab. Restaurants who have their whole menu available in the listing will get more options: users can add new dishes, see popular ones, report inaccurate photos, and add pics of existing dish items. I tried browsing multiple restaurant listings in the USA, and while many of them had the dedicated Menu tab, none of those additional options were available..

One last thing I need to note is that in case you're thinking the green tagging boxes look familiar, they started showing up several months ago for some users on supermarket listings. In the examples below, you can see produce photos being recognized and suggested product names that go all the way from clothing to peony and cooking banana.

Thanks, Alvar Lagerlöf!

I'm seeing the dish tagging pop-ups on Google Maps 10.2.1 beta (APK Mirror), though as I said earlier, it's possible that this is available on older versions of the app. Let us know if you spot any other dish tagging options, like a proper integration with the Menu tab.

Source: Google