Google continues to enhance its Photos app, used by millions of users to store memories, documents, and screenshots. After adding natural language search with Gemini, the company is now integrating a simple, yet devilishly effective feature: quote search.
Quotation marks to sort through the chaos
In concrete terms, simply add a word or phrase in quotation marks to the Google Photos search bar and the app will display only images containing that exact text. This text can be found in a file name, a caption, or directly integrated into the image—as is the case on a sign, a scanned document, or a screenshot.
Quotation search allows you to very precisely target text elements, something that was missing from the app. Until now, the algorithm offered broader results, often useful but not always relevant. The new feature therefore significantly refines the results, avoiding approximate matches.
This new feature complements the groundwork begun last year with the integration of Gemini, the search engine's artificial intelligence model. Thanks to it, users could already find a photo by describing a scene, mentioning a person, or evoking a place. Now, they can also search for a specific word in the image.
Let's take a concrete example: you're looking for a photo of your passport, but can't remember the date it was taken. By typing "French Republic" in quotation marks in the search, Google Photos will directly display images containing this expression, without making you go through dozens of vacation snaps.
The feature is already active on all platforms: Android, iOS, and the web version. It doesn't require any special manipulation, other than adding quotation marks around the search text. And according to initial feedback, it works smoothly and, above all, reliably.
As users' photo galleries grow, sometimes with thousands of images accumulated over the years, the ability to find specific content becomes a real user issue. Google Photos has understood this well. While AI search already provided significant convenience, the ability to combine descriptions and exact text will allow users to efficiently sort through their digital shoebox.
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