Google Photos is finally letting us turn off its gen AI search—about time

Google has been on a Gemini-everywhere rampage for years now, and honestly, it’s been exhausting. Every product update feels like another AI feature nobody asked for, shoved into a UI that used to be fine. But for once, the pushback actually worked.

Google Photos is getting a toggle to disable the new “Ask Photos” search experience and go back to the old, non-Gemini system. Shimrit Ben-Yair, the head of Google Photos, confirmed the company heard the complaints and is rolling out an easy way to switch back.

This is a big deal, and not just because it’s rare for Google to backtrack on an AI feature. The original Google Photos search was genuinely revolutionary for its time. You could search “dog on beach” and it would actually find the right photos, using computer vision that predated the current generative AI hype. It was fast, accurate, and didn’t try to chat with you.

Then came Ask Photos, powered by Gemini. Instead of just finding your images, it tries to have a conversation, generate summaries, and generally insert itself where it wasn’t needed. The rollout has been rocky, to put it mildly. Users reported slower results, weird hallucinations, and a general sense that the feature was solving a problem that didn’t exist.

I’ve been using Google Photos since the Nexus days, and the search was one of the few things that genuinely felt like magic. You didn’t need to tag anything, you didn’t need folders—just type what you remembered and there it was. Replacing that with a chatty AI that sometimes misidentifies objects was a downgrade, plain and simple.

So yes, this toggle is welcome. But it’s also telling that Google had to be dragged into offering it. The company’s default position seems to be “AI first, user preference second.” That works when the AI is actually better. When it’s not, you get situations like this.

No word yet on exactly when the toggle will roll out, but Ben-Yair says it’s coming soon. If you’re one of the people who’ve been frustrated by Ask Photos, keep an eye on your settings. And if you never had a problem with the old search—well, now you can keep it that way.