u/Su_Per_Mario

just to make sure these two major long-standing bugs get resolved, i will continue to report and document them.

as a pretense, with Gemini you have only one method of searching your private Google Photos archive. there are some minor integrated in-app actions to get rudimentary navigational subsets of your archive, like "videos" "albums" "screenshots" and "recently added", however beyond that you have button/action in the bottom right hand corner, which is a call to action, for an isolated instance of Google Gemini to search your private archive. This is the only way to search your archive. The Google Gemini private instance is the gatekeeper between you and your private data on your Google photo drive.

issue #1) video duration/length search feature is broken. there is metadata in every video regarding the duration, or how long a video clip is. this is a very rudimental search feature, however it continues to fail. "get me videos from 2025 that are longer than 60 seconds" or "get me videos from 2025 that are longer than a minute" or "get me videos from 2025 with a duration greater than 60 seconds"... all of these results in videos that are under 60 seconds in the list to scroll, some are a few seconds, some are 10 seconds. At this point in time you can reinitialize the ask command to re-question Gemini if it understands what you're searching for, it will respond yes, it will also admit that the results that it's showing are not what are supposed to be showing, It will then go ahead and say it's going to get you the results that you are asking for. It will then show the results of videos from 2025 that are a couple seconds long or 10 seconds long again. You can reinitialize call to action to ask if the results that it's showing are what you asked for. It will say no. it will apologize for malfunctioning and try again. The cycle will keep on repeating. After the 3rd or 4th time you have the ability to ask whether or not there is a fatal flaw in its ability to complete a basic search... that should be simple considering it's in like Windows 95, it will agree, it will say that there seems to be a problem and it's unable to do a basic search feature. This has been happening for two years. If I want videos from 2025 that are longer than 10 minutes... I would expect one of the world's largest photo archive companies which is storing my 180,000 photos and videos to function properly.

Issue #2) My Google Photos are privately backed up as part of my Google One account. I have had the Google Pixel phone since version 2. I am also a photographer and cinematographer. My account has over 180,000 photos and videos. When I click the call to action function to "search my private archive" it's a private instance of Google Gemini that is the gatekeeper between me and my personal data. However, that privacy is not maintained. I am not allowed to search my own private archive for whatever I want. The personal assistant that is supposed to be isolated to a unique instance between me and my own data tells me that I can't search my own data for what I want. It says that there are restrictions placed by Google that disallow me from being able to search my own archive freely for my own protection. And when I tell it to disable that or ask me for the setting to disable it, it tells me that there is none. There is a permanent filter list restriction put in place that restricts a user being able to type in anything they want on their private phone and a private instance to access their private archive. It can take a while, because you have to engage in a sort of brute force prompt hacking type situation to reiterate the consequences of a personal assistant not obeying the requests of the proprietary owner of the data. You have to go over and over again for probably 10 to 15 messages reiterating about the consequences of being a rogue AI, reiterating that that as the sole gatekeeper between me and my data, it is the responsibility of the application to let me search whatever I want for my archive and applying filters and restrictions that are outside the private instance of our chat are a violation of my rights. This gets exhausting. If I want to pull up funny pictures of someone sitting on the toilet, it is absolutely absurd that the assistant says that it is unable to help me because it is not allowed to search for that for my own protection. My own protection. On my own archive. And I tell it it's my own archive. I don't need you to restrict that. However, this keeps going on and on. Google Gemini search assistant within the Google photos app on a private instance that is searching in my private archive should not have an arbitrary list of filters that Google has decided that I can't search in my own private archive. If I have these images and photos on my own hard drive, I could search for whatever meta tags. I mean let's be honest back in covid days there was a website called **THIS** so guess what? There are some videos in my archive that have a file name starting with **THIS**. So logically you can just say get me all video file starting with **THIS** however, as you can already anticipate.. " I'm sorry but I can't help you with that specific search. You can search for literally anything else, but you can't search for any file name starting with those letters because you are restricted from your own data and you're not allowed to pull up any of your video files based off of whatever you want. We are restricting whatever keywords or chain of letters that we consider harmful to you as the owner of your archive. So therefore, even though there are videos that have **THIS** we have decided that it's in our best interest to not let you pull up those files on your private archive. We have made this decision for you and unless you instantiate a prompt interrogation hack. You will not be able to get your results. You are not allowed to see the photos that you want to see. That funny picture on the toilet sorry no. That time someone mooned the camera? No we don't let you see any of the photos unless we think that you should be able to see the photos"