Google is pausing the rollout of its AI-powered “Ask Photos” feature within Google Photos, which has been slowly expanding since last fall. “Ask Photos isn’t where it needs to be,” wrote Jamie Aspinall, a product manager for Google Photos, in a post on X responding to criticism, citing three factors: latency, quality, and user experience.
The experimental feature is powered by Google’s “most capable” Gemini AI models. Specifically, it’s a specialized version of its Gemini models that are “only used for Ask Photos,” according to Google.
Aspinall said Google had paused the feature’s rollout “at very small numbers while we address these issues,” and that in about two weeks, the team would ship a better version “that brings back the speed and recall of the original search.
At the same time, Google also announced Tuesday that keyword search in Photos is getting better, allowing you to use quotes to find exact text matches within “filenames, camera models, captions, or text within photos,” or search without quotes to include visual matches too.
Google announced the feature last May at I/O 2024, and positioned it as a way to query your Photos app for common-sense questions that another human would typically have to help with — i.e., asking about which themes you’ve chosen in the past for a child’s birthday party, or which national parks you’ve visited.
“Gemini’s multimodal capabilities can help understand exactly what’s happening in each photo and can even read text in the image if required,” the company wrote in the announcement. “Ask Photos then crafts a helpful response and picks which photos and videos to return.”
It’s not the first time Google has paused the rollout of an AI-powered feature, as it competes in a quickly intensifying AI arms race against other tech giants and startups alike.
Last May, within weeks of debuting “AI Overview” in Google Search, Google paused the feature after nonsensical and inaccurate answers went viral on social media, with no way to opt out of usage. Two high-profile examples: The feature called Barack Obama the first Muslim president of the United States, and recommended users put glue on pizza to keep the cheese on.
And last February, Google rolled out Gemini’s image-generation tool with a good deal of fanfare, then paused the feature that same month after users reported historical inaccuracies, such as an AI-generated image depicting the U.S. Founding Fathers as people of color.