Google Photos provides easier access to users’ photo collections with its new AI-powered search feature “Ask Photos”. Announced at Google I/O 2024, Google’s annual developer conference, the feature is powered by Google’s Gemini AI model and allows users to search for photos with natural language queries.
Whereas users previously searched for specific people, places, or objects in Google Photos, the AI now enables more complex and natural searches.
For example, instead of searching for “Scenery”, you could make a more complex request to the AI, such as “Find the best photos I’ve taken in nature”. To identify the best photos, the AI evaluates various factors, such as light and blur, and can filter photos taken in nature with location information.
Google introduces Ask Photos: AI-driven search for your visual memories
Ask Photos builds on Google Photos’ recently launched Photo Stacks feature and improves it with artificial intelligence. Photo Stacks group similar photos and highlight the best photos with the help of artificial intelligence. Considering that more than 6 billion photos are uploaded to Google Photos every day, Ask Photos is intended to help users find the photos they want in their expanding digital collections.
Now this feature is getting even better. With Ask Photos, users can also ask questions about the content of their photos and get useful answers. For example, a parent could ask what themes were used at their child’s last four birthday parties, and the AI could show relevant photos and videos, indicating the use of mermaid, princess, and unicorn themes. Such queries stem from Google Photos’ understanding of not only keywords but also natural language concepts such as “themed birthday party”. The AI’s multimodal capabilities also allow it to extract information from text in photos.
Ask Photos, a new feature coming to @GooglePhotos, makes it easier to search across your photos and videos with the help of Gemini models. It goes beyond simple search to understand context and answer more complex questions. #GoogleIO pic.twitter.com/OsYXZLo5S1
— Google (@Google) May 14, 2024
Personalized experience with AI
Google CEO Sundar Pichai shared an example of a user asking an AI to show his child’s swimming progress in the Ask Photos demo he gave to the press at the opening keynote of the Google I/O conference. The AI responded by compiling photos and videos of the child swimming over time. In addition, the AI demonstrated its sophistication by being able to access information such as a user’s license plate or passport number from hundreds of photos.
Artificial intelligence can sometimes give inaccurate results, but it improves and personalizes over time thanks to user corrections. Google also said that Ask Photos never uses users’ data for advertising and that other people do not have access to the photos.
Ask Photos will initially be available in US English as a language option and will later be rolled out to other markets. For now, Ask Photos is a text-only feature and maybe more deeply integrated with Gemini on Android devices in the future.
Featured image credit: Google / Edited by Furkan Demirkaya
