Google Has Stopped This AI Photo Feature For Its Users: Here’s Why

Google’s AI journey has moved at a steady pace but the company has once again hit a hurdle in this race against OpenAI. Google released the AI-powered Ask Photos feature that works within the Photos app and for multiple reasons it has decided to pause the roll out for its users. 

We first got to know about Ask Photos at the I/O 2024 last year and Google was widely tipped to fix the issues before making it available in the market. But new reports suggest the issues are still around and users will have to wait a little longer before getting a full tilt at the new AI feature. But why was the roll out paused? 

Ask Photos Paused But Why? 

Google’s product manager shared the news via a post on X recently and also gave the reason for this decision. Jamie Aspinall claims the Ask AI feature was facing issues related to latency, quality and the overall experience of how the AI tool offered results. Basically Aspinall says, Ask Photos is not where it needs to be, which seems like a fair call to make rather than let it become an issue in the public. 

Ask Photos is essentially there to help you answer queries about photos, understand the context of the visuals and even retrieve the text from images. He also pointed out the roll out has been paused for a very small number of users which could be in hundreds or thousands, depending on how widespread the release was offered earlier. 

The good news is that Google is already working on the issues facing Ask Photos and Aspinall claims the new and refined version of the tool will be available in about two weeks which is a decent timeline if the app works smoothly. 

The AI Glitches Continue 

Google and other companies are facing issues with their AI features and Ask Photos is the latest to see its release put on hold. The company had faced errors and hallucinations with AI overviews and AI image generation tools last year, forcing the company to apologise and stop its release before it makes further dent in the market. 

Apple also faced issues with the AI news summary tool that was fabricating news details and not sharing the actual news to the users. The company decided to take it easy with the new AI updates at the WWDC 2025 keynote this week and we hope less incidents and issues like these make the headlines in the coming months.