There seems to be a lot of discussion regarding an issue with missing photos on many Google Places pages. A thread on the Google Places Help forum has received several threads in which business owners are stating that they are unable to update any images on for their Places accounts.
From the forum threads, it appears that the main issue is that you quite simply cannot add new images when the image source comes from a third party site. Other reports state that Google Places images that were upload years ago seem to be missing as well. Certainly this is a concern for businesses that rely on Google Places for a large portion of their online presence.
In the Google Places help thread, Google employee, Vanessa Gene responded to concerns with the following comment:
We know you’re having trouble, and we’re working on it – but in the mean time, if you’re having trouble uploading your photos via the Places dashboard, use the photo upload tool via the listing itself, and manage them via your Picasa web album. – Vanessa