[illuminati1911]

Summary

• Check Places Photo HTTP status before returning its image iterator.
• Raise HTTPError immediately for non-2xx responses, preserving the status code and closing the response without consuming the error body.
• Preserve lazy binary streaming on success and existing transient retries.
• Add behavioral regression coverage, document the exception, and add a changelog entry. Static Maps and shared retry behavior are unchanged.

The existing implementation exposes iter_content() without validating the photo response status: https://github.com/googlemaps/google-maps-services-python/blob/d3b71ab1333cff0f900d2db6b39c1356341a5ea2/googlemaps/places.py#L535-L544

Verification

On Python 3.10.20:

• python -m pytest tests/test_places.py — 10 passed, including 4 replacement photo tests.
• python -m pytest — 108 passed.
• Real localhost HTTP checks passed for JSON/text/HTML errors, terminal HTTP 429, successful binary streaming, 503-to-success, and 503-to-terminal-error transitions. No Google Maps requests or real credentials were used.
• nox --download-python never -s docs --force-python 3.10 — passed; visually inspected the rendered exception and iterator-return documentation and changelog.
• Diff/whitespace checks passed.

The prescribed Python 3.7 docs build remains unverified because that interpreter is unavailable. The Python 3.10 build is supplemental. Tests ran directly using the repository's test dependencies, avoiding the automatic Codecov upload.