Google pauses Photos' app AI-powered 'Ask Photos'
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Jamie Aspinall, product manager for Google Photos, confirmed the pause on X Tuesday, citing three critical issues: latency, quality, and user experience. "Ask Photos isn't where it needs to be," Aspinall wrote in response to user criticism about the AI-powered search tool.
The feature, which uses Google's
Gemini AI
models to let users search their photo libraries with natural language queries, has been rolling out to a limited number of users since October 2024.
Users can ask questions like "Show me the best photo from each national park I've visited" or "What themes have we had for birthday parties?"
However, early users reported significant problems. The feature often missed relevant photos, ran painfully slow, and provided an inferior experience compared to Google Photos' traditional keyword search. Some users described the AI search as making "Google Photos worse" overall.
Aspinall said the rollout has been paused "at very small numbers" while Google addresses these issues. The company expects to ship an improved version in approximately two weeks that "brings back the speed and recall of the original search."
Google first announced Ask Photos at its I/O developer conference in May 2024, positioning it as a major upgrade that would make finding specific memories easier. The feature was designed to understand context and subjects in photos using Gemini's multimodal capabilities, even reading text within images.
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This isn't Google's first AI feature pause. The company previously halted AI Overviews in Search after viral mistakes and paused Gemini's image generation tool due to historical inaccuracies.
Users who currently have access to Ask Photos can disable it through the app's settings under "Gemini features in Google Photos."
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