Maybe it was a graduation or a big birthday five years ago. Or that Mother’s Day dinner alone, or that video from the Thanksgiving gathering with extended family. Or maybe it was the perfect selfie with perfect lighting.
Precious moments can easily be buried deep in the camera roll, and finding that one photo you need now can quickly turn into a hunt and click from hell. The search features available on smartphones can only do so much, and the way media is organized tends to go with what developers want and mandatory updates.
Yes, you can type “dog” or “beach” into your phone’s media image search bar and get a decent result, but what if you’re looking for the perfect photo of that time you balanced a shell in your dog’s snoot while at a beach oyster bar?
Whether it’s finding photos of a great trip or useful stories like screenshots of receipts, I’m testing the AI-powered search function of Google Photos to find out if the tool can really help you find those photos as quickly as possible.
Here’s how to use AI to manage and easily find your media.
It gives Google access
This may be the most painful part of the process, but it is worth the tax of annoyance. You’ll need a Google account and upload your media to Google Photos, which, for me, took all night. It’s among the more than 5,500 videos and photos I’ve collected about many iPhone upgrades. (You’ll be in the best position if you have an Android phone and already use Google Photos.)
Once the upload is complete, you will need to open Google Gemini AI and give it a notification. Mine was a simple question: Show me all the pictures of your pets. Wherever you decide to start, this first prompt will start the permissions process, where Gemini will open a new window and ask you to change access.
You will need to give the system a few days (in my experience) to catalog and specify your media to complete the final step of the approval process.
Gemini will guide you through it, but it’s just a matter of clicking your photo to verify your Face ID.
Places, loved ones and unlimited options
This is where the fun begins. Once you’ve given Gemini access to your Google Photos, you can search for media using any method you can come up with.
My simple pet photo search provided the most accurate results, Gemini serving up every memory I had of those furry crazies. The results were sorted by date in descending order, giving me the unexpected added bonus of being shown how worried I was about my dog in May 2023.
Clicking on any image brings you to its associated folder for more information.
I also tested the tool by asking it to show me pictures of pink flowers from my Google Photos to see if it could handle certain object descriptions, and not only did it provide pictures of pink flowers, but it also provided classification by type. And he actually classified them by type accurately.
Simple pictures
I’m sure you’re guilty of it — snapping a quick photo of something just to remember a series of numbers or where you parked your car, then losing the photo in question to other things at a more critical moment.
Gemini can go through your photos and find those pesky reminders that have fallen through the cracks. I used it to find the name of the golf clubs I liked back in September 2025.
You can also use it to find photos you’ve taken of things like receipts, your driver’s license, bills and any other media you need to manage and access easily.
See the full history
