from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why does Google Photos' search suck?

by sexy_seedbox on 5/19/25, 3:57 PM with 2 comments

I take all my photos with Google Camera on a Google Pixel phone. I give Google all of my location and I even tag most of my photos with descriptive captions. How is it possible for it to only find 4 photos of "cats" when I have literally hundreds of cat photos on my phone?

  • by Suppafly on 5/19/25, 4:51 PM

    I don't tag mine at all and don't use any geolocation stuff and it works really well finding cats or finding cars or whatever. I wonder if I have different options set or something. I don't think I've ever customized it.

  • by solardev on 5/19/25, 4:17 PM

    Are you using the new AI / Gemini search? It seems to work better when I turn that OFF and use the old search. It's buried in the settings.

    Mine brings up hundreds of photos of cats, both mine and random ones that I didn't even know were in the photos.

    It's even semi decent at telling apart individual pets (you can give them names just like people), though it sometimes struggles between our different black and white cats.