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Google has been on a roll lately with updates that make its platform dramatically more user-friendly than before, and one of the most impressive of these is the new Ask Photos feature in Google Photos. The feature has been hinted at for the better part of a year, but the official announcement came at the beginning of September when interested fans could sign up for a waitlist. According to the folks at 9to5Google, those early adopters might now have the feature available to them.
Ask Photos is a Gemini-powered tool that uses text prompts to search your photo library. If you’re like my wife and have 25,000 photos (or more) saved to the cloud, this feature makes it possible to find a specific image without scrolling for hours.
Perhaps the most exciting part of this update is that it isn’t limited to Google devices. Since the change applies to the Google Photos platform, it works on both Android and iOS. You’ll see it as a new tab in the Photos app that replaces the original Search tab. Don’t worry; the old-school search feature is still there, too, but you have to use Ask Photos now. Bear in mind that this feature isn’t available to everyone yet, but if you’ve signed up for the waitlist, it’s worth checking.
If Google already recognizes some of the people in the photos, it will ask you to define their relationship to you (you also have to do this for pets.) It also prompts you to review the terms and conditions regarding data privacy. At a glance, those permissions look pretty secure — Google says that responses aren’t reviewed by humans, never used for ads, and aren’t used to train generative AI models besides Photos.
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Ben Schoon | 9to5Google - 2.
Ben Schoon | 9to5Google - 3.
Ben Schoon | 9to5Google
9to5Google’s Ben Schoon says that his testing has been limited, but early impressions suggest the feature works a lot better at finding people and places rather than specific time periods. He says it returned irrelevant search results when asked about events from years ago, but more recent events show accurate results. His theory is that Google uses location data to narrow down results, but time will tell as the feature becomes more widely adopted.
This feature is exclusive to the United States for the moment. If you can’t yet access it, you can sign up for the waitlist here.
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