After a year of user complaints, Google is finally making it simple to escape the AI trap in Photos. The company is rolling out a toggle that lets you choose between its Gemini-powered Ask Photos feature and the fast, familiar keyword search you've used for years.
The change is modest but significant. The toggle appears right on the search screen itself, not buried three layers deep in settings where it was before. Google acknowledged that users want more control over search results, letting them choose between fast classic search and intelligent Ask Photos.
This is a retreat, though Google won't frame it that way. Ask Photos was meant to be an upgrade, powered by Gemini AI, but sparked one of the most significant user backlashes in the app's recent history. The complaints were loud and persistent: the feature was too slow, returned incomplete results, and sometimes failed to find images that the old search would catch instantly.
A Reddit post amassed over 1,600 upvotes with users calling Ask Photos "the worst feature ever". Users with large photo libraries were particularly frustrated. Someone searching for "kookaburra" would get nothing at all, while a search for "birds" might return just six images from a collection of hundreds. The AI's tendency to curate and summarise results worked against people who simply wanted comprehensive results.
Google acknowledged the mess in June 2025, pausing the rollout. The company paused Ask Photos expansion in June 2025 due to performance complaints. Rather than admitting defeat entirely, Google said the feature needed tuning. The pause held for months while the company worked on improvements.
Here's where the toggle becomes revealing. Rather than forcing everyone toward its AI-first vision, Google is now letting users decide. The switch allows for faster, keyword-based results when speed is a priority, while keeping the AI's natural-language capabilities available for complex queries. This is a pragmatic compromise that acknowledges a real trade-off: classic search excels at precise, structured lookups, while Ask Photos shines with open-ended, conversational questions.
Google's head of Photos, Shimrit Ben-Yair, says the "most popular searches" should see improved quality, while Ask Photos has seen "a significant increase" in positive feedback in recent months. Whether that reflects genuine improvement or simply reflects that frustrated users have left is unclear. What matters is that the company is now giving users a genuine choice rather than assuming it knows what they want.
The lesson here cuts both ways. For Google, it's a reminder that even well-intentioned AI features can backfire when they prioritise capability over user experience. For users, it shows that sustained, vocal feedback does move companies, even one as massive and AI-committed as Google. The Photos toggle is not a surrender; it is Google saying: we heard you, we're still working on this, but in the meantime, you get to decide.