Google is integrating more of its services with AI, as the company announced that its personal agent, Gemini Spark, can now manage your Google Photos library. That means you can ask Gemini Spark to execute tasks in Google Photos, like editing images, curating albums, automatically creating shared albums with your favorite shots, turning concert flyer photos into calendar appointments, running workflows, and more.
On Thursday evening, Google Photos lead Shimrit Ben-Yair shared the new capabilities in a post on X, noting that the new capabilities would roll out over the next few weeks to eligible Gemini AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the U.S. in English.
The company didn’t say if or when it would roll out more broadly to international markets.
The addition is yet another example of Google attempting to find product-market fit in terms of making AI appealing to consumers — in this case, by automating tedious tasks and helping people manage what are now often sizable photo libraries.
The move comes at a time when the AI industry is reckoning with the fact that it hasn’t properly sold the promise of AI to consumers. This week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Bloomberg that the industry has “done a terrible job” communicating the benefits of technology, which has led to backlash from communities around the world.
Announcements like this from Google are part of the problem. While they may make certain tasks easier, on their own, such features don’t seem revolutionary or even, really, necessary. (It’s not that difficult to make a photo album after all.) But the competitive nature of the AI industry is pushing companies to promote every AI-infused upgrade, no matter how small, instead of waiting until the company can tell a broader story about how AI has shaped its software for the better.
To use Gemini Spark with Google Photos, you’ll need to first connect Google Photos to Gemini, then toggle on Spark in the top corner of the Gemini app, and enter your prompt.
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