Google Photos has a decent search experience right now. I was recently trying to find some photos of my sister’s engagement from a few years ago, and a simple “yellow dress” with her name added in front brought all the images to my fingertips within moments. But Google thinks it can do even better and is now supercharging the search function with improvements to natural language processing and, you guessed it, artificial intelligence.
Improving the search experience is crucial because our online photo libraries are getting bigger and bigger every year. That means it’s harder to find those photos from Dad’s 60th birthday without sifting through so much other stuff. Google says more than 6 billion images are uploaded daily to Google Photos, and nearly half a billion people use the app’s search function every month.
This update works in two separate parts. First, Google is upgrading the existing search with better natural language processing to understand more descriptive queries. You won’t have to use specific keywords anymore. Some examples Google provided include “Alice and me laughing” and “Kayaking on a lake surrounded by mountains.” Some of this will require you to take advantage of certain Google Photos features, like identifying yourself and people in your photos so the system understands who “Alice” is. These results can be sorted by date or relevance.
Google says this new update is rolling out in English to Android and iOS starting today and will expand to other languages in the coming weeks.
The next part of the search upgrade comes in the form of Ask Photos, the feature Google announced at its I/O developer conference in May. Ask Photos is powered by Gemini, Google’s large language model chatbot, and it’s replacing the traditional search experience in Google Photos. It uses multimodal large language models to understand text in a picture along with the images and subjects in it. This process is a little odd, because you’re getting a conversational experience when searching for a photo, somewhat like AI Overviews in Google Search, though the results can be more powerful and provide greater context.