Sodiq Olanrewaju · September 10, 2024 · 2 min read Google first announced “Ask Photos” as an experimental feature at its May 14th I/O event. Now, it’s rolling out the Gemini-powered conversational search for Google Photos users in the United States. Ask Photos lets users find photos, images, and videos using natural and descriptive search queries.
Intuitively in lieu of simple keywords—like you’re having a conversation with the Google Photo search box. The more descriptive your query, the better and more relevant the results. In addition to improved search queries, users can now further also sort search results by relevance or date.
According to Google, Ask Photos can understand concepts like “themed birthday party,” bridal shower, graduation, etc. It can also read texts in images, understand events/happenings in a photo, and uncover information about users’ personal lives to provide accurate search results.
Google Photos users can now search for things like, “Where did I spend my last birthday?”, “When does my XYZ voucher expire?”, “What did I have for lunch at ABC hotel in Greece?” and other conversation-esque queries. Ask Photos then uses Gemini’s multimodal capabilities to process the search and return relevant photos that match the query. The result page will also include text responses that further answer the search query.
If Ask Photos doesn’t immediately find relevant photos/videos, users can provide more details to help it better understand the query.
Summarily, the search functionality in Google Photos is now also a chat bot, thanks to Gemini. Ask Photos is a Gemini integration that’ll help users find photos or videos of people, places, pets, and things. The feature is currently available in English to all users (on Android and iOS) in the United States. Google says it’ll roll out in more languages and regions in the coming weeks.
