A few weeks ago, I wrote about how my Google Photos library has gotten too big to effectively manage. Google Photos has been around for years now, and Photos’ existing library management and search tools just aren’t up to the task of helping me comb through nearly a decade’s worth of uploads.
But at Google I/O this week, along with roughly one billion other AI-related reveals, Google announced that Photos is getting a new, Gemini-powered search experience called Ask Photos. With it, you can ask Photos for specific things, and Gemini will scour your library to find them, using its ability to interpret visual information to find your pictures much more quickly than a human ever could. I more or less asked for this exact feature last month, and I’m really excited to get it — assuming it’s not exclusive to the Pixel 9, anyway.
AI is very well suited to image search
It almost seems like a given
Google Photos seems like an ideal place for Google to put Gemini to work. Photos’ existing library management tools offer some genuinely useful features like automatic person and pet tagging, but the experience of trying to find a specific photo or set of photos that doesn’t contain any tagged faces is routinely frustrating.
Leveraging Gemini’s ability to understand both complex written requests and the visual contents of images, Ask Photos should make it easy to find anything in your image library that you’re able to describe. It’s not even just about finding specific photos — Google’s blog post announcing the new tool features complex queries like “Show me the best photo from each national park I’ve visited,” a request that saw Photos turn up “a great photo from each of the 22 national parks” the hypothetical user had visited, along with bullet points describing the contents of the images.
You can even use Ask Photos to find information lurking in your Google Photos library. An onstage demo during the I/O keynote showed a user asking Photos what their license plate number is, and Ask Photos turned up an image where the plate number was visible, plus a text summary containing the same info.
There are the usual caveats here, of course. The animations Google uses to showcase the upcoming feature have disclaimers pointing out that the sequences shown are simulated, not actual screen recordings of Ask Photos in action. They also caution users to “Check results for accuracy,” a reminder that AI is still pretty likely to misunderstand or completely fabricate some information.
But given Ask Photos is finding existing images and not generating new ones, the risk posed by Gemini misunderstanding your prompt or hallucinating some shaky info is pretty small. You might end up seeing photos you weren’t looking for, or getting a caption that incorrectly describes an image — hardly catastrophic failures.
I saw Google’s ‘vision for the future of AI assistants’ at I/O, and I’m cautiously optimistic
Project Astra is set to bring real-time multimodal input to Gemini
‘People will not review your conversations’
In the existing Gemini experience today, both on Android and in the web app, there’s a warning that “conversations are processed by human reviewers.” In that context, the prompts you put to Gemini and the answers it gives are not private — it’s possible, even likely, that someone you don’t know will read your interactions with Gemini.
But when Gemini is working in Ask Photos, its replies to your prompts will feature your personal photos, which makes the prospect of human oversight seem awfully uncomfortable; even if there’s nothing sensitive in your pics, you probably don’t want strangers leafing through them. Fortunately, in its announcement post for Ask Photos, Google says that the Gemini experience in Photos is considerably more private:
Your personal data in Google Photos is never used for ads. And people will not review your conversations and personal data in Ask Photos, except in rare cases to address abuse or harm. We also don’t train any generative AI product outside of Google Photos on this personal data, including other Gemini models and products.
There are apparently exceptions where human reviewers can step in “to address abuse or harm,” but if I’m reading this right, it looks like using Ask Photos won’t open users up to any additional privacy concerns. I’ve reached out to Google for more info on this point, and I’ll update this post to include any new info I might receive.
Ask Photos is rolling out ‘in the coming months’
We don’t know when or on which devices
I’m kind of a Google Photos power user; I upload far too many photos, don’t delete enough of them, and consequently have a mess of tens of thousands of images and dozens of albums to deal with. An AI-supercharged search tool that can scan through my entire library in seconds to find specific photos or photos that fit certain criteria would seriously simplify things for me. It sounds like my ideal Gemini feature.
As is often the case with I/O announcements, we have very little idea of when Ask Photos will actually be available; Google only says “in the coming months.” We also don’t really know where: Google used similar language about an AI-generated wallpaper feature it announced at last year’s I/O, saying it would launch the following fall. We assumed at the time that meant as part of Android 14, but the feature launched exclusively on Pixel 8, and is still exclusive to what seems like an arbitrary selection of phones to this day. It’d be an absolute shame to see that happen with Ask Photos — there’s no reason server-side search features should be exclusive to specific devices.
But if Ask Photos rolls out broadly, and if it works as well as Google has implied, and if nothing sketchy comes to light about how Gemini in Photos deals with privacy, the feature seems like a minor dream come true. That’s a lot of ifs, I know, but I’m holding out hope for this one — it’s exactly the kind of AI implementation I want to see from Google.
5 new Gemini AI features that could change your life
Now all Google has to do is actually deliver
