"According to Google Photos head Shimrit Ben-Yair, the company has heard the complaints. As a result, Google Photos will soon make it easy to go back to the traditional, non-Gemini search system."
"Ask Photos is intended to better respond to natural language queries, but it's much slower than the traditional search, and the way it chooses the pictures to display seems much more prone to error. It was so bad that Google had to pause the full rollout of Ask Photos in summer 2025 to make vital improvements, although it's still not very good."
"If you weren't using Google Photos from the start, it can be hard to understand just how revolutionary the search experience was. We went from painstakingly scrolling through timelines to find photos to being able to just search for what was in them."
Google has aggressively integrated Gemini AI across its products, but Google Photos users have rejected the new Ask Photos search experience. The Gemini-powered feature, launched in beta in 2024, processes natural language queries but operates significantly slower than traditional search and frequently returns inaccurate results. Despite Google's efforts to gather feedback and make improvements, including pausing the full rollout in summer 2025, Ask Photos remains problematic. Responding to widespread complaints, Google Photos leadership has decided to implement a simple toggle allowing users to revert to the classic, non-Gemini search system that revolutionized photo discovery.
Read at Ars Technica
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]