Google finally gives Photos users a way to turn off the AI search

Google has spent the last few years on a mission to cram Gemini into everything — Gmail, Docs, Search, even your grocery list if it could. For most of us, this has been less “helpful intelligence” and more “annoying feature I didn’t ask for.” But every once in a while, the company actually listens.

This time it’s about Google Photos. The rollout of the Gemini-powered “Ask Photos” search experience has been a mess. Users complained that the new AI search was slower, less accurate, and generally worse than the old system that let you just type “dog on beach” and get results in seconds. The old search was already a marvel of AI — it just wasn’t the shiny new kind.

Shimrit Ben-Yair, head of Google Photos, acknowledged the feedback and said the company will add a simple toggle to bring back the classic search experience. No digging through settings menus, no hidden flags. Just a switch to go back to the search that actually worked.

This is a bigger deal than it sounds. Google has been notoriously stubborn about rolling back AI features. Remember when they forced the new Gmail layout? Or when they kept shoving Assistant into every corner of Android? Usually, complaints just get a canned response about “listening to feedback” while nothing changes.

What makes this interesting is that the old Photos search was already a brilliant application of AI — just not generative AI. It used computer vision to understand the content of your photos without hallucinating or making stuff up. You could search for “birthday cake” and it would actually find photos with birthday cakes in them. Revolutionary for its time, and still better than what most competitors offer.

But Google, like every other tech giant right now, has a bad case of generative AI fever. Everything has to be a chatbot. Everything has to use a large language model. Even if the old approach worked perfectly fine. Even if users actively hate the new one.

So this reversal is refreshing. It suggests that someone at Google still remembers that the product is supposed to serve the user, not the other way around. The toggle won’t be available immediately — Ben-Yair said it’s coming “soon” — but it’s a step in the right direction.

I just hope this becomes a pattern. Give us a toggle for AI summaries in Search. Let us turn off Gemini in Gmail. Not everyone wants their tools to talk back to them. Sometimes you just want to find a photo of your dog without arguing with a chatbot.