It’s hard to improve on a good search function. In many ways, you don’t need to. Does your existing search work well? Great! Then don’t change it.
Unfortunately, Google seems to have lost that memo. Not content with making Google Search actively worse, it’s cramming AI features into its apps, including an AI-powered version of its existing search called Ask Photos.
No, I don’t want to.
Ask Photos is a worse version of a previously perfect feature, and it made using Photos harder — until I realized I could turn it off.
I’ve used Google Photos since day one, and I’m finally reaching a breaking point
My photo library is too large to manage, with over 1,000 images uploaded this year
Ask Photos is a worse version of search
What is Ask Photos? Imagine a regular search feature, but made worse through the inclusion of AI.
I’m being overly mean.
Ultimately, it’s exactly what you’d expect an AI chatbot pretending to be a search function to be. You’re encouraged to speak to it in conversational tones, and it’ll spit out more specific answers than a regular search.
You might ask it, “Show me pictures of that holiday I went on to Italy two years ago,” or “I want to see videos of my cat, Eric, playing with toys,” and it’ll show you results that match your request.
Sounds neat, right? Well, sort of.
It’s overly complex. The old Photos search was easy. If you’d identified people, it could pull them up in the search, and you could add basic actions or descriptions to that, too.
It worked nicely. But Ask Photos takes it too far.
It’s so darn slow. I got sick of waiting for my searches to finish, and I swapped back to the regular search as soon as I knew I could.
It may be objectively less powerful, but it doesn’t need that power. It’s supposed to be a simple tool for a simple job, and that’s how I like it.
I largely use Google Photos’ search to look at pictures of my daughters when I miss them. That’s roughly about 10 minutes after they’ve gone to bed.
Search was good at that. It knew what I wanted. Ask Photos will do that, but I need to jump through extra hoops and pretend I want to engage with a chatbot to get there.
It’s too much. It’s overengineering at its finest, and it can get lost.
How to switch back to the old Google Photos search (and turn off some other AI features, too)
Switching back to the old search is rather easy.
First, open Google Photos. Then, tap your face in the upper-right corner. Choose Photos settings, then Preferences.
Gemini features in Photos is your next step, and then all you do is tap the Ask Photos slider to switch it off.
But while you’re here, it’s also worth considering whether you want the rest of the Gemini-powered features on or not.
Gemini-powered memories uses Google’s AI to create little recap videos and albums for you in the background, and Help me title does exactly what you’d think it does, adding suggestions for the titles of your memories.
You can turn these off if you don’t want them, and you can toggle off Use Gemini in Photos if you want to remove Gemini from Photos altogether.
It’ll even delete all the data it’s gathered about your Photos use when you turn it off.
Ask Photos is exactly what AI shouldn’t be
Silicon Valley innovators have gotten stick for years for reinventing the bus again and again, and in this case, it’s hard to see this as anything other than Google reinventing the search feature.
Yes, Ask Photos has some skills that search doesn’t have, but how often do you actually use the search function for anything particularly complex?
If you want to see your snaps from a holiday, you scroll down to the approximate date in your Photos gallery and look. You don’t use search for it.
You might use search to find something specific, like your cat playing, but the basic Photos search already did that.
Ask Photos is more powerful. I’ll freely admit that. But is it such a large innovation that Google needed to rename search entirely and pretend it was a new thing?
No. Just no.
It’s things like this that ignite the cynicism in me.
Ask Photos’ new features could have been added to the normal search, because ultimately, they’re not actually that much of an improvement. But it wasn’t, and that was a deliberate decision.
I suspect the new name has been used because it highlights that AI has been used, and visible AI makes investors happy — but that’s just a theory.
What I do know is that this is the worst way to implement AI.
AI works well when it’s inserted into a pre-existing work process, and it fails when it wants to replace that process.
On phones, people are less willing to use a new app or process when they already have one that works.
Google could have introduced this as a new chatbot in the Photos app, but it knows as well as you or me that nobody would use it. So instead, it replaced search with it. Shoehorn it in, and make people use it.
That really gets my back up.
Oh, I can talk to it like a person? Big deal, I’ve known people all my life, and I spend most of my time trying to avoid talking to most of them.
What I like is search. It’s impersonal, quick, and it does its job. Ask Photos is too big, too ambitious, too unnecessary — and that’s why it needs to go.
