Google Photos may soon let you clean your library with prompts

Cleaning up a Google Photos library is one of those chores that everyone puts off. Google Photos does let you select a bunch of photos and delete or archive them, but finding the right ones across years of screenshots, duplicates, and blurry shots is the hard part, and the mess only grows with time. Ask Photos can already find specific photos for you using natural language, but it stops there. That could soon change, as Google appears to be working on letting Ask Photos act on what it finds, in bulk.

Code within Google Photos v8.0 suggests these tasks could extend to bulk operations such as saving all, archiving all, deleting all, sharing all, adding selected items to an album, and a more generic “Apply to all”:

Thankfully, Ask Photos doesn’t seem to be getting free rein over your library. Buttons like “Looks good,” “Edit selection,” and “Continue” suggest the assistant will first show you what it has picked and what it plans to do, and nothing happens until you sign off on it. We saw similar behavior in our testing, where Ask Photos paused for approval before saving or creating anything.

There does appear to be a limit to the number of photos you can select for a bulk operation, though the strings don’t reveal the exact number.

Deleting photos could tell you how much space you’ll get back

Deletion is a major functionality for any gallery app, and it seems that Ask Photos within Google Photos could get its own dedicated flow.

Instead of a vague confirmation, Ask Photos could show you exactly how many items it’s about to delete and how much storage you’d free up in the process, along with a “Review” option to double-check its picks. Once it’s done, users would get a confirmation of how many photos were deleted and a reminder that they’re sitting in Trash, in case the AI got a little overzealous and you want to restore something.

We managed to activate the functionality ahead of its launch, and this is what it would look like:

The prompt above included only the last five photos, and skipped over recent videos.

Ask Photos could also take you straight to Google Photos’ “Free up space” section and Storage manager, so storage cleanup seems to be a key part of Google’s plans here.

We also spotted Google Photos working on a dedicated section for your RAW photos, which we managed to surface through Ask Photos. Since RAW files are some of the biggest space hogs in any library, pairing the two could make it much easier to find and clear them out.

One of the suggested prompts in the new Ask Photos overlay already points in this direction: “Suggest old receipts I could delete.” Pair that with the bulk delete flow, and you could soon ask Ask Photos to round up years of old receipts, review its picks, and clear them out in one go.

Ask Photos could let you edit photos in bulk, too

Ask Photos’ bulk actions may not stop at housekeeping and photo chores. When we asked Ask Photos to find two photos of our dog and enhance them, it edited both in one go and let us “Save all” or “Edit selection” to keep only the ones we liked.

Suggested prompts and a plural “Enhance photos” action hint that this could scale to larger batches, too:

Google Photos has never let you edit multiple photos at once on its own, so this would plug a long-standing gap.

Google hasn’t announced any of these changes yet, but if they roll out, Ask Photos could finally go from a search bar that finds the exact photos in your messy library to an assistant that actually cleans it up. We’ll keep you updated when we learn more.