Tech Desk 
Jun 27, 2025
Google Photos has announced that it has enhanced the “Ask Photos” feature’s ability to quickly return search results.
The company revealed that the AI feature, first introduced at Google’s I/O developer conference last year, lets users search across their collection of digital photos using natural language queries.
Using Google’s Gemini, “Ask Photos” taps into the AI’s ability to understand a photo’s content and its other metadata when responding to input.
However, users complained the AI feature wasn’t reliable and was often slow to respond while the AI was “thinking.”
Taking to X (formerly Twitter) for addressing these concerns, Google Photos Product Manager Jamie Aspinall earlier in June, stated: “Ask Photos isn’t where it needs to be, in terms of latency, quality and UX,” and noted the rollout would be paused for a couple of weeks while Google worked to bring back the “speed and recall of the original search.”
In a short blog post published on Thursday, Google says it’s bringing the best of Photos’ classic search feature into Ask Photos, particularly for simple searches like “beach” or “dogs.” This allows the search results to display more quickly, as classic search did before.
Meanwhile, the AI will work in the background to find the most relevant photos and work to answer more complex queries.
The interface still allows you to switch to classic search if you prefer. As a result of these changes, Google has now resumed the rollout of Ask Photos to more people across the US.
To be eligible to use Ask Photos, you must be 18 or older, and your account language must be set to English. You must also enable Face Groups, the feature that labels the people and pets found in the Google Photos library.
