At I/O 2024, Google announced a fantastic new AI feature for Google Photos, simply called “Ask Photos.” With "Ask Photos" you can think of the app like a chatbot, like Gemini or ChatGPT: you can request a specific photo from the gallery, or ask the app a general question about your photos, and the AI will sift through your entire Gallery to find the photo you want. Find photos and answers to your questions in both.
Ask how photos work?
When you ask Ask a Photo a question, the bot performs a detailed search of your photo library on your behalf: it first identifies relevant keywords in your query, such as places, people, and dates, as well as longer phrases, such as " Summer” hiking in Maine. "
Ask Photos will then study the search results and determine which results are most relevant to your original query. Gemini's multimodal capabilities allow it to process elements of each photo, including text, subject, and motion, which helps it determine whether the image is relevant to the search. Once Ask Photos selects relevant photos and videos for your query, it combines them into a useful response.
Google says your personal data in Google Photos will never be used for ads, and human reviewers won't see conversions and personal data in Ask Photos except "in rare cases to address abuse or harm." . The company also said it will not use Google Photo data to train other artificial intelligence products, including other Gemini models and services.
What can you do with Ask Photo?
Of course, Ask Photo is a great way to quickly find the specific photo you're looking for. You can ask, "Show me the best photos from last year's trip to Spain," and Google Photos will pull up all of your photos from that vacation, along with a text summary of the results. You can use this feature to arrange these photos in a new album, or generate captions for social media posts.
However, the more interesting use here is to find answers to questions contained in photos without having to scroll through them yourself. Google shared a great example in the demo: If you ask the app "What's my license plate number?" it will identify your car from all the car photos in your gallery. Not only does it return a photo of the car with the license plate, it also answers the original question. If you're asking a friend for recommendations about the best restaurants in a city you've been to, you can ask, "What restaurants did we go to in New York last year?" "Ask Photos" will return images of restaurants in your gallery that you can share list of.
Ask when the photos will be available?
Google said the experimental feature will be rolled out in the coming months, but did not give a specific timeline.
