AI Can Generate Pictures, but It Can Also Help Locate Your Lost Real Photos

Maybe it was a graduation or a big birthday five years ago. Or that one Mother’s Day surprise dinner, or that video from a Thanksgiving get-together with the extended family. Or maybe it was just a particularly good selfie with perfect lighting.

Precious moments can easily get buried deep in the depths of a camera roll, and finding that one pic you need right now can quickly devolve into a hunt-and-peck from hell. Search features native to smartphones can only do so much, and the way media is organized is often up to the whims of developers and mandatory updates.

Yes, you could type “dog” or “beach” into the image search bar in your phone‘s media and get a decent result, but what if you’re looking for a very specific image of that one time you balanced a shell on your dog’s snoot while at the beachside oyster bar?

Whether it’s locating pics of adorable outings or matters of utility such as screenshots of receipts, I put Google Photos’ AI-enabled search function to the test to discover if the tool really can help you find those images a lot faster.

Here’s how to use AI to manage and easily find your media.

Giving Google access

This might be the most painful part of the process, but it is well worth the annoyance tax. You’ll need a Google account and to upload your media to Google Photos, which, in my case, took a full evening. Blame it on the more than 5,500 videos and images I’ve collected over many iPhone upgrades. (You’ll be in a much better position if you have an Android phone and are already using Google Photos.)

Rachel Kane/CNET

Once the upload is complete, you’ll need to open Google Gemini AI and give it a prompt. Mine was a simple ask: Show me all the photos of my pets. Wherever you decide to start, this first prompt will kick off the permissions process, in which Gemini will open a new window and ask you to toggle on access.

Google will ask you to toggle access on.Screenshot by CNET

You’ll need to give the system a few days (in my experience) to catalog and crawl your media so you can complete the final step of the permission process. 

Gemini will guide you through it, but it’s just a matter of clicking an image of yourself to confirm your face ID.

Screenshot by CNET

Rachel Kane/Screenshot by CNET

Locations, loved ones and limitless options

This is when the fun starts. Once you’ve given Gemini access to your Google Photos, you can search for media using any criteria you can come up with. 

My simple request for pet pics yielded extremely accurate results, with Gemini serving up every single memory I had stored featuring those furry lunatics. The results were sorted by date in descending order, giving me the added unexpected bonus of a visualization of how obsessed I was with my dog in May 2023.

Screenshot by CNET

Clicking on any image brings you to the folder associated with it for more details.

Rachel Kane/CNET

I also tested the tool by asking it to show me images of pink flowers from my Google Photos to see if it could handle specific descriptions of objects, and it not only served up images of pink flowers, but also offered to separate them by type. And it actually separated them by type accurately.

Rachel Kane/Screenshot by CNET

Images of convenience

I’m sure you’re guilty of it — snapping a quick pic of something simply for the sake of remembering a string of numbers or where you parked your car, and then losing the image in question in the deluge of other stuff at the most critical moment. 

Gemini can parse through your pictures and find those pesky reminders that fell through the cracks. I used it to find the brand name of the golf clubs I was interested in way back in September 2025.

Rachel Kane/Screenshot by CNET

You can also use it to find pictures you’ve taken of things like receipts, your driver’s license, bills and any other media you need to manage and access in a pinch.

Rachel Kane

Contributor and former Senior Editor

Rachel is a freelancer based in Echo Park, Los Angeles and has been writing and producing content for nearly two decades on subjects ranging from tech to fashion, health and lifestyle to entertainment and education. She's currently a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, helping to mold the new minds who will inherit the media landscape. She's hoping to prevent the singularity by being polite to chatbots and spends way too much time refining Midjourney prompts. See full bio