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Title

Article: After complaints, Google will make it easier to disable gen AI search in Photos

Impact Score

4 / 10

AI Summary (Processed Content)

Google has faced significant user backlash over its AI-driven changes, particularly the rollout of the Gemini-powered "Ask Photos" feature, which is slower and less accurate than the classic search. In response to complaints, Google Photos will introduce a toggle to allow users to revert to the traditional search experience.

The company had to pause the full rollout of Ask Photos in 2025 for improvements after negative feedback, acknowledging the new system's flaws. This contrasts with the original, highly effective AI search in Photos that revolutionized finding images by content.

The main topics covered are user dissatisfaction with Google's AI integration, the specific problems with the Ask Photos feature, and Google's decision to provide a classic search toggle.

Original URL

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/03/google-backtracks-on-ai-search-in-photos-adds-toggle-for-fast-classic-search/

Source Feed

Ars Technica

Published Date

2026-03-10 18:37

Fetched Date

2026-03-10 16:30

Processed Date

2026-03-10 16:31

Embedding Status

Present

Cluster ID

Not Clustered

Raw Extracted Content

Google has spent the past few years in a constant state of AI escalation, rolling out new versions of its Gemini models and integrating that technology into every feature possible. To say this has been an annoyance for Google’s userbase would be an understatement. Still, the AI-fueled evolution of Google products continues unabated—except for Google Photos. After waffling on how to handle changes to search in Photos, Google has relented and will add a simple toggle to bring back the classic search experience.
The rollout of the Gemini-powered Ask Photos search experience has not been smooth. According to Google Photos head Shimrit Ben-Yair, the company has heard the complaints. As a result, Google Photos will soon make it easy to go back to the traditional, non-Gemini search system.
If you weren’t using Google Photos from the start, it can be hard to understand just how revolutionary the search experience was. We went from painstakingly scrolling through timelines to find photos to being able to just search for what was in them. This application of artificial intelligence predates the current obsession with generative systems, and that’s why Google decided a few years ago it had to go.
Google launched the beta Ask Photos experience in 2024, rolling it out slowly in the Photos app while it gathered feedback. Google got a whole lot of feedback, most of it negative. Ask Photos is intended to better respond to natural language queries, but it’s much slower than the traditional search, and the way it chooses the pictures to display seems much more prone to error. It was so bad that Google had to pause the full rollout of Ask Photos in summer 2025 to make vital improvements, although it’s still not very good.