Last year, Google introduced a number of improvements to the search functionality within Google Photos, including the AI-powered Ask Photos feature that uses Gemini to help surface specific images and information from your library. Today, Google announced that it’s rolling out new search functionality in Photos that lets you search for specific text in your photos.
In a post on the Google Photos Help Community forum, Google detailed the new functionality. When searching in Google Photos, you’ll see results that match your search visually as well as results that contain text matching your search terms. If you add quotation marks around your query, Photos will only return results that contain that text.
This applies to text within images as well as text in photo data, so you’re able to search by camera model, file name, or caption. You could actually already search for text in photo data, but using quotation marks now ensures you’ll only get results with matching text.
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Available in Google Photos right now
I’ve got this functionality already and Google’s post doesn’t mention a rollout timeline, so it seems like this new search feature is generally available right now. Given Photos turned 10 years old recently, anything that makes it easier to wrangle our growing photo libraries is appreciated.
A couple of months ago, we saw evidence that Google Photos would be getting another tweak to make search easier in a different way: Google has been testing a new, lower placement for the app’s search bar. That change still hasn’t materialized in the wild, however.
