You’ll Soon Be Able to Use Gemini to Search Google Photos
At I/O 2024, Google announced an exciting new AI feature for Google Photos simply called Ask Photos . With Ask Photos, you can treat the app like a chatbot, say Gemini or ChatGPT : you can ask for a specific photo in your library , or ask the app a general question about your photos, and the AI will go through your entire library so that both find photos and answers to your questions.
How does Ask Photos work?
When you ask Ask Photos a question, the bot performs a detailed search of your library on your behalf: It first identifies relevant keywords in your query, such as places, people, and dates, as well as longer phrases such as “summer.” hike to Maine.”
Ask Photos will then examine the search results and decide which ones are most relevant to your original query. Gemini’s multimodal capabilities allow it to process elements of each photo, including text, objects and actions, which helps it decide whether the image is suitable for search. Once Ask Photos selects suitable photos and videos for your request, it combines them into a useful answer.
Google says your personal data in Google Photos is never used for advertising, and reviewers won’t see conversions or personal data in Ask Photos except in “rare cases where abuse or harm is involved.” The company also said it does not train its other artificial intelligence products on Google Photos data, including other Gemini models and services.
What can you do with Ask Photos?
Of course, Ask Photos is the perfect way to quickly find the photos you need. You can ask, “Show me the best photos from my trip to Spain last year,” and Google Photos will curate all your photos from that vacation, along with a text summary of the results. You can use this feature to organize these photos. in a new album or create captions for a social media post.
However, a more interesting use here is to find answers to questions contained in your photos without having to scroll through those photos yourself. During the presentation, Google shared a great example: If you ask the app, “What’s my license plate number?” it will identify your car among all the car photos in your library. Not only will it return an image of your car with a license plate, but it will also answer the original question itself. If you’re giving advice to a friend about what restaurants to try in a city you’ve visited, you might ask, “What restaurants did we go to in New York last year?” and Ask Photos will return both images of restaurants in your library and a list you can share.
When will Ask for Photos be available?
Google says the experimental feature will launch in the coming months, but no specific time frame has been given.