Google Photos gets Gemini-powered search: What this means for users

Google Photos update: Google has been slowly adding support for Gemini to all its products and services. In the past couple of months, the company has brought Gemini support to Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs and Google Sheet. And now, the company is doing the same in case of Google Photos app.

Google today announced that it is bringing Gemini-powered search feature to Google Photos.

"Now you can use more descriptive queries — beyond just using simple keywords — to search for images and videos in Photos and get more relevant results," Google wrote in a blog post announcing the roll-out.

Google Photos gets Gemini-powered search

Up until now, Google Photos users could look a specific image in the app using identifiers such as date, people and place. They could also look for images in separate folders within the app. Now, Google is rolling out a new Gemini-powered search feature in Google Photos app that transforms the process of searching for specific images in the app by enabling users to look for images using queries that they use in everyday lives.

"For example, you can search for specific photos in a natural, descriptive way, like 'Alice and me laughing', 'Kayaking on a lake surrounded by mountains' or 'Emma painting in the backyard'," Google wrote in its blog post explaining the feature.

This feature builds on top of the search features already available in the Google Photos app. Google has started rolling out the Gemini-powered search to Google Photos users on Android and iOS in English. The company plans to add support for more languages in the coming weeks.

Ask Photos comes to Google Photos

Another Gemini-powered feature that Google is bringing to its Photos app is a feature called 'Ask Photos'. This feature uses latest Gemini models to understand the context of a users' photo galleries and pull out relevant details to help them find specific memories.

Google says that the 'Ask Photos' feature understands context and it supports conversational queries. This means users can not only ask it to show images from a trip they took two years ago but they can also ask it to summarise the top things that they did during the same trip.

That said, the Ask Photos feature is not available to all users yet. At the moment, it is available to select users in the US who have opted to use Google Labs. It is expected to roll-out to more users globally once the company has ironed out all the issues.