Google Photos “Ask Photos” Feature Exits Early Preview

Google announced today that its AI-powered Ask Photos feature in Google Photos has improved and is out of early access.

“Ask Photos uses Gemini models to answer complex queries, but we’ve also heard your feedback that it should return more photos faster for simple searches, like ‘beach’ or ‘dogs’,” Google explains in its The Keyword blog. “To address this, we’re bringing the best of Photos’ classic search feature into Ask Photos and improving latency, so you can get fast help with simple and complex queries in one place. ”

Ask Photos replaces the previous Search experience in Photos and it’s been horrible in my experience to date, forcing me to switch back to the old experience manually. But according to Google, it should be better going forward. It will display search results immediately while the Gemini models work in the background to answer more complex queries like “what did I eat on my trip to Barcelona?” or “show me photos that’d make great phone backgrounds.

Thanks to this improvement, Google has taken Ask Photos out of early access. And it’s now available to more eligible users in the U.S. Eligible users being U.S. customers 18 or older with the Face Groups feature enabled. (You can learn more here.)