Ask Photos: A new way to search your photos with Gemini

Google Photos was one of the first products we built with AI at the center, giving you the ability to search your photos and videos for people, pets, places and more. Now we're giving Google Photos a major upgrade with Gemini, our most capable AI model. With Ask Photos, our newest experimental feature rolling out over the coming months, it’s even easier for you to look for a specific memory or recall information included in your gallery.

Find the right content, more intuitively

Over 6 billion photos are uploaded every day to Google Photos. As people's galleries grow, finding what you need can lead to scrolling through pages of photos and videos — even if you have the right combination of keywords. With Ask Photos, you can ask for what you’re looking for in a natural way, like: "Show me the best photo from each national park I’ve visited.” Google Photos can show you what you need, saving you from all that scrolling.

Ask questions, get helpful answers

Often we snap photos to capture memories or save important details, but the information in those photos can get lost in the shuffle. Ask Photos uncovers that information for you when you ask questions about your life, like where you camped last year or when your vouchers expire. Gemini’s multimodal capabilities can understand the context and subject of photos to pull out details. For example, you can ask: “What themes have we had for Lena’s birthday parties?”. Ask Photos will understand details, like what decorations are in the background or on the birthday cake, to give you the answer.

Get more help with tasks, beyond search

Getting tasks done is also easier in Google Photos with the help of Gemini models. For example, at the end of a long trip, it can be daunting to curate the best snaps you took to share with friends and family. Ask Photos can help you create a trip highlight more easily. All you need to do is ask, and it’ll suggest top pictures — and even write a personalized caption to share on social media.

How Ask Photos works under the hood

• Understanding your question: Ask Photos understands your query, and then forms a plan to find the answer. It issues a sophisticated search on your behalf, identifying not only relevant keywords, like places, people and dates, but also natural language concepts like "themed birthday party."
• Crafting the response: The next step is studying the search results, figuring out which are the most relevant and which seem to be what you're looking for. Gemini's multimodal capabilities can help understand exactly what's happening in each photo and can even read text in the image if required. Ask Photos then crafts a helpful response and picks which photos and videos to return.
• Ensuring safety and remembering corrections: While Ask Photos is experimental and will not get everything right, we employ layers of safeguards and AI models to help ensure responses are safe and appropriate. And if you correct an answer or provide extra information, Ask Photos can remember details for the future.

How we protect your privacy

The information in your photos can be deeply personal, and we take the responsibility of protecting it very seriously. Your personal data in Google Photos is never used for ads. And people will not review your conversations and personal data in Ask Photos, except in rare cases to address abuse or harm. We also don't train any generative AI product outside of Google Photos on this personal data, including other Gemini models and products. As always, all your data in Google Photos is protected with our industry-leading security measures.

Try Ask Photos in the coming months

Ask Photos is an experimental feature that we're starting to roll out soon, with more capabilities to come. We can’t wait for you to try it and share feedback so we can continue to make it more useful as we build the next chapter of Google Photos together.