I’ve been using Google Photos since day one and I’m finally reaching a breaking point

If I could pick just one of the many Google services I use regularly and keep for life, losing access to all the others, it would be Google Photos Google Photos.

Having automatic and accessible backups of my photos that can be edited and shared on any device I use is a luxury that is so deeply ingrained in my life. It would be a significant adjustment to go without.

But Google Photos is changing This year 11 years old, and I have been there from the beginning.

Despite Google’s best efforts with features like automatic people tagging, algorithmically curated memories, and a robust suite of search features, I’m finding my photo library is becoming too big to manage.

At first glance, that’s a very big deal me problem — I have a lot of photos saved, and yes, I should delete some of them.

But as we continue to take photos, our libraries will continue to grow, and I think Google Photos could do more to make life easier with large image libraries like mine.

The problem: years and years of photos

Google Photos is over a decade old

Google Photos launched in May 2015, and anyone who has used it regularly since then will surely have amassed a dense library of images by now. I certainly have; This year alone I have uploaded over 1,000 images to the service.

This is not unusual for me. I take a lot of photos with my phone, but I also have the habit of manually uploading photos taken with my mirrorless camera.

The appeal of having all my photos in one place is a big part of what I like about Google Photos. Plus, I like to add photos from my dedicated camera to the albums that appear on my smart displays.

I even scanned old family photos from the 1930s.

Long story short: my Google Photos library is filled. And if yours isn’t here yet, it’s only a matter of time.

Lately I’ve been feeling the urge to actually do things with photos I’ve taken, rather than letting them sit unseen on a Google server – mostly printing them out, individually for framing or in photo albums.

This has led to a renewed interest in the contents of the deeper layers of my photo library.

Google Photos search has done a lot for me there. You can use the search feature to narrow views to specific years or months, find photos taken in specific locations, and search for people and pets that Google has tagged.

But despite all of Google’s machine learning techniques, searching for Photos can be clunky.

When I search for “Pixel 6” to find images taken with that phone, the search results include images whose metadata show they were taken with a Pixel 6, but they also include photos taken with other Pixel phones that have a “6” somewhere in the metadata, or are even visible on the photo itself.

It’s also difficult to limit a search to only images taken with a particular camera model.

You can search Photos for images of specific objects or situations, and if that works, it’s a great experience.

However, Google’s search algorithms have difficulty identifying images of vaguer concepts.

A search for ‘wedding’ will bring up a number of photos I’ve taken at weddings, as well as photos I’ve taken for a clever ring review and, oddly enough, a single photo of a (non-wedding) cake that I’ve taken several photos of.

Photos gets it just about right when it comes to tagging people and pets, but Google’s implementation is a bit annoying.

There are some expected misidentifications (Photos seems to think most dogs I see are one of mine), and in addition there’s still no option to manually tag faces or pets that Photos doesn’t automatically clock as a person or animal.

I have enough photos of the people in my life that don’t show enough of their faces for Google to identify them – with their faces turned away from the camera, or covering their faces from laughing – and as it stands now, there’s no way to group those photos with the rest of the same people.

Two very different solutions

A lot of my whining could be solved with a pretty low-tech addition: tags.

As I’ve already touched on, Google automatically tags recognized faces in Photos, and recently gave users the ability to recategorize document photos that were automatically identified as the wrong type.

But manual tagging is missing. I would love it if Google offered the ability to tag people in photos where its algorithms failed to recognize an identifiable human, and add those images to the appropriate search results.

I also wish I could more easily add manual tags for things other than people or pets to my images.

You can add hashtags to photo descriptions and use the Photos search bar to find them later, but there’s no central place to view all the tags.

If keeping all that clear is important to you, it’s best to take notes in another app. In an ideal scenario, I could see Google suggesting tags you’ve previously used on visually similar images.

But an even bigger improvement will come in the form I’m sure we’re all expecting: AI-powered search.

It was inevitable that Google would inject Gemini into Photos, and it has.

Request photos is the latest AI feature from Google Photos and uses Gemini to search through your photos using conversational language with complex parameters.

You can ask him what you ate when you visited certain places, or you can show pictures of times when people wore specific items of clothing. It is powerful and a true blessing to me.

As exhausted as I am with big tech pushing AI into every crevice where it fits (and plenty where it doesn’t), I’m optimistic about this.

The company’s in-house LLM can already do that generate images based on wildly specific parameters – that flipping to find existing photos in a finite library is simple by comparison.

Now I can describe a photo I remember in my library in natural language, and see how an AI-powered Google Photos serves it up.

I hope I can keep my photos in Google’s cloud

Ultimately, we will all have to consider personal digital photo libraries that span decades. Some of us already are.

An app can’t completely solve that problem, but I think Google Photos is in a good position to alleviate it.

I just hope another cloud photo service doesn’t beat Google to the punch. I get tired just thinking about migrating my library.