As a part of its slew AI updates announced at I/O 2024, Google has announced a new feature called Ask Photos. This is a capability in the Google photos app that leverages the company's Gemini 1.5 Pro large language model to make it easier than ever to find your photos.

Google Photos already relied on AI to identify people and objects in photos, but Gemini is greatly expanding upon this with search capabilities that make use of Gemini's multi-modal nature.

Just ask for what you want

If you use Google Photos to store all your memories, there's a good chance you have thousands of photos stored on your drive, and sorting through them can be a nightmare if you're looking for something specific from a year ago or further back. With Ask Photos, you can tell the Photos app to find you pictures of a specific place, or various places, all in one go. In Google's example, you can say "Show me the best photo from each national park I've visited", and Photos will collect photos from all your trips trips that match that description.

But it goes even deeper than that. Rather than just find a specific photo, Google Photos can search your memories to answer your questions. For example, if you can't remember that one trip you went to when you saw a specific wild animal, you can ask things like "what parks did I visit last year?". What's more, it can understand information in the pictures to provide more relevant answers, so if you ask it what you've done each year for your (or someone else's) birthday party, it can also bring those results up.

Like all AI-based products, Ask Photos will sometimes still make errors, but you can also make corrections to the results it brings up and help it learn faster. Ask Photos will start rolling out soon, so you won't see it right away.

Google had a lot more to share at I/O, though, including Project Astra, its new Veo video generation model, and much more.