Google Photos just got a Gemini upgrade: What it is, how will it benefit users

Google Photos Gemini update: Google is aggressively integrating Gemini in all its products and services. Earlier this month, the company rolled out Gemini-powered features in Gmail. And now it is doing the same in case of its Google Photos app. The company today announced that it is bringing two new Gemini-powered features to Google Photos. While one feature will enhance the image searching experience in Google Photos app, the other feature will understand contextual queries to pull out relevant information.

"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 rollout.

"We're also rolling out early access for Ask Photos, our Gemini-powered conversational search experience, to select users in the US," the company added.

Google Photos' Ask Photos feature

As mentioned before, Google is bringing its Ask Photos feature to Google Photos. This feature was announced at Google's annual developers' conference, that is, Google I/O 2024, earlier this year and now, the company has finally started rolling it out to its users. For understanding, Google Photos' Ask Photos feature uses Gemini 'to understand the context of a users' photo galleries and pullout relevant details to help them find specific memories'. Users can use Ask Photos to find images using contextual queries. It can also pull out and summarise information from images.

As far as availability is concerned, the Ask Photos feature is available to select Google Photos users in US who have opted to use Google Labs.

Gemini-powered search in Google Search

Another feature coming to Google Photos is a feature called Gemini-powered search. Unlike the existing search feature, which uses identifiers such as date, people and place to look for images, the updated search in Google Photos lets users search for specific 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 added in its blog post.

As far as availability is concerned, Google has confirmed that it has already started rolling the updated search experience in the Google Photos app to Android and iOS users in English. The company plans to add support for more languages in the coming weeks.