Gemini is now fully integrated across your Android devices, and there are several features you should be using to make your life a bit easier. Specifically, Gemini’s integration with Google Photos is a major quality-of-life upgrade, and it has made my gallery uniform and more accessible.
I have a gallery containing a decade of photos, which is hard for me to keep track of manually. Fortunately, Gemini has made it easier to narrow down the exact picture, and I don’t even have to search for keywords to find that specific photo myself.
My camera roll is a graveyard
A gallery with a decade of content makes it hard to find a specific photo
Between the mountains and celebrating my 18th birthday, Google Photos has nearly all of my memories from the past decade. I’ve also been snapping shots of important data as a teenager, like photos of my first car’s VIN or my phone’s IMEI number, which I used to file a police report after I lost my Galaxy S20.
There’s a lot of stuff that I would have to scroll for hours to find manually. Google Photos relies on machine learning to identify objects, places, and faces, and OCR kicks in to read the text inside the images. However, these searches aren’t foolproof and sometimes can fail or bring up false results.
Ask Photos transforms your gallery into a search engine
Just a single prompt and Gemini will pull up the photo you’ve been searching for
After enabling Ask Photos in Google Photos, you can ask the AI model in natural language to pull up a specific photo from no matter how long ago. If you’ve named a person in your gallery, you can also bring up a shot from a specific time by describing details of the image.
You can ask Gemini to bring up the first time you ever joined the gym and then ask it to show the latest results to get a better understanding of your progression — you get a much more organized layout instead of randomly looking through photos of yourself every year to see how well you’ve been putting in the work.
To better understand your searches, you can name specific people in your gallery. Photos automatically recognizes a face and lists all photos with the same face that you can name later on. Then, you can use Ask Photos to pull exact photos of that individual during a specific point in time. Or, if it’s someone from your past (like your ex), you can block that person from appearing in your gallery.
Other than that, you can also combine photos to create a separate gallery, which would make it easier to revisit down the line. I’ve made a gallery of summer holidays from 2025 and a highlight of my 20th birthday.
If you’ve just installed Photos, keep in mind that the Ask Photos feature will only work for photos that Google has backed up. Most Gemini-related features won’t work locally.
Gemini reads the fine print so you don’t have to
No more zooming in and squinting
Now, there are interesting ways you can bunch these features together. Using the Ask Photos feature, Gemini processes your image, reads what’s in it, and you can ask it to pull specific text out of a photo, and it will hand you the answer.
You won’t have to manually copy the content from an image to write it down, e.g., like a password for an old account you forgot but remember sitting in your gallery from 10 years ago, but you couldn’t recognize your own handwriting.
To test the feature and cite an example, I asked Gemini through Ask Photos to bring up the license plate for the very first car I had — a 7th-generation Civic. I remember taking photos of the car in front of my dad’s office when I put it up for sale back in 2023, and Gemini pulled the license number from that time.
Don’t expect results to be flawless all the time
The Ask Photos feature in Photos isn’t guaranteed to get the right responses all the time — it struggles with low-resolution photos or with poor handwriting, so don’t expect it to decipher an old school assignment from a decade ago. Fortunately, you can follow up with Gemini with additional prompts if it misses the mark on the first try.
For those worried about feeding their private content to AI, Google has clarified that the backed-up photos are protected by “world-class security” and that they don’t sell your content for ads to use it to target ads. The only time Google uses your data is to train the Photos model, and the good news is that you can stop it from doing so.