Google's new and improved Ask Photos is back on track — and rolling out now!
TL;DR Ask Photos is a Google Photos feature designed to answer questions about the contents of your photo library.
While announced at Google I/O 2024, access over the past year has been extremely limited.
Earlier this month we heard the rollout was paused while Google worked to address a few issues, but today it's back on track.
Over the past couple years, AI has been changing the way we do lots of things, and while there is absolutely no shortage of controversial uses of the tech, there are also some places where employing it just makes all the sense in the world. Back at I/O 2024, Google announced one of those really clever-sounding use cases, with Ask Photos for Google Photos promising to make your gigantic archive of pics actually useful by letting you search through it using natural language. After a very bumpy year, it finally sounds like Ask Photos is now ready to live up to its potential.
Following that introduction, we caught an early look at Ask Photos last summer, but even by the time fall rolled around access was still extremely limited, with Google only testing Ask Photos with a small group of users.
By 2025, it was starting to become clear that something was wrong, and earlier this month, Google Photos Product Manager Jamie Aspinall confirmed that the rollout of Ask Photos has been paused. Aspinall was surprisingly candid about the struggles the service faced, admitting failures 'in terms of latency, quality and ux.' While that was unfortunate to hear, he also teased that a much-improved iteration of Ask Photos was just around the corner.
While Aspinall predicted we'd see Ask Photos make its return in about two weeks, it's been just over three now, and today Google confirms that Ask Photos is back on track.
As of now, access is expanding beyond those early testers, and Google says that 'more' eligible Photos users in the US should be getting access. That suggest to us that Google's still being a little cautious with deployment, but hopefully everyone who's interested gets a chance to try it soon.
To be eligible to use Ask Photos you need to be an English-speaking user in the US who has Face Groups toggled on.
We also hear about some new functionality, and it sounds like Google cooked this up specifically to address some of the speed concerns we'd seen expressed about Ask Photos earlier. The app's basically combining classic search with this Gemini-powered upgrade to initially surface some broadly relevant results, while Gemini continues to crunch your query in the background. That means you get to see at least some pics straight away, rather than feeling like you're waiting forever on Ask Photos.
Once you're able to give it a try for yourself, let us know in the comments if this was worth waiting for.
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