We've all done it before: you're at a restaurant, your meal has just arrived, and it looks so delicious that you must take a picture. Usually that image ends up being posted on social media or sent to a friend, but there's another app that would love your food photos: Google Maps. According to Android Police, a Google Maps feature will pop up a notification asking the user to upload a recent photo.

The info reportedly sent out to users calls the feature "Photo Notifications." For now, this addition is on an "early rollout" to high-ranking members of the Google Maps "Local Guides" community. The picture shows the Android version of the Google Maps spawning a system notification asking if a user would like to upload a recent photo to Google Maps.

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. Google Photos has a cloud-based computer vision system which can detect and tag objects like "food" in a picture, but with no Google Photos requirement, it doesn't seem like the computer vision system is in use here.

The photos Google Maps is asking for will end up in the public "Places" database of Google Maps—a collection of Yelp-style reviews and pictures that are submitted by users. Despite Maps being installed on far more devices, Yelp has much more data than Google when it comes to reviews. With this move, it looks like Google is trying to leverage that huge install base by bugging users to upload photos.

It's not the first time Google Maps has tried to get more Places data 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 the feature is going to move past the "early rollout" and become available to the entire Google Maps user base. Right in the photo notification, there is a "Feedback" link, suggesting Google is interested to hear what users think of the new feature. (Consider this your cue to leave a comment.)