Credit: Google

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.

A toggle will soon appear in the Photos search tab to let you disable Ask Photos.
Credit: Google

Before this change, disabling Ask Photos required digging three levels deep in the settings. Now, Google will add an AI toggle to the top of the search tab. When flipped to the on position, you get the Gemini-powered Ask Photos search, complete with summaries and questionable grouping. Turn that off, and you’ll get the “fast classic search,” according to Ben-Yair.

All is not lost for Ask Photos, though. Ben-Yair says the team is still re-tuning the model in hopes of streamlining the experience. Some of the “most popular searches” have been improved recently to provide higher-quality results. This has apparently led to improved feedback from users of the app. So don’t count Ask Photos out just yet. Google clearly wants to fully transition the Photos search experience to Gemini, but that’ll be harder to pull off now that there’s a prominent toggle that gives people the classic (and much better) search experience. Having both options side by side will really illustrate the problems with Ask Photos.