Whenever a new AI feature is announced, I don't rush to try it. These days every app is adding AI features everywhere, and most of them are not very useful. You open the feature once, look at it for a minute and never touch it again. So I have stopped paying attention to most of these headline-grabbing AI features.
And that's what I did with Google Photos' new Wardrobe feature. When I saw the announcement, I assumed it was another gimmick and moved on. Then when the feature arrived in Google Photos, I finally opened it, and this time I was wrong. It's really useful and it solves a small but real problem I face almost every week.
What Google Photos' Wardrobe Actually Does
Wardrobe is an AI-powered digital closet built right inside Google Photos. It scans your photo library, segments every piece of clothing you have worn in your pictures and sorts it all into neat categories like tops, bottoms, footwear and accessories.
You don't manually upload anything or take an image of your clothes. It just pulls everything from the last four years of photos already available in your Google Photos library.
To access it, open the Google Photos app, move to the Collection tab and open Wardrobe. Here, you get two options: Items and Outfits. Under Items, I can filter by category like Accessories, Bottoms, Tops, Footwear, Hats, Bags, Jewellery and more.
For example, tapping on Accessories shows my glasses, belt and other minutes. Within minutes I was looking at my Beatles t-shirt, my brown jeans, my olive slides and a pair of glasses I had completely forgotten I owned.
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Mix, Match and Try It On
But that is not all. You have the Create button where you can pick the items you want, like a top, a pair of bottoms, footwear and an accessory. Now, Google stitches up to six of them into a single outfit. You can save these combinations for different occasions, which is handy when you are packing for a trip.
Then there is Try It On. Just tap it and Google generates an image of you wearing the outfit. This feature is powered by Google's powerful Nano Banana image model.
I selected my Beatles t-shirt, brown jeans, olive slides, and black glasses, hit Generate and a few seconds later I saw myself in that exact fit. The app warns that the results may be unexpected, but in my case, the fit and my face all came out shockingly real. Even when a result is slightly off, you can still see how the clothes look together, which is the whole point.
Best of all, this works straight from my Google Photos library, and I don't need to manually upload any selfie. For over a year, Google has offered a Try On button in Google Search and Shopping. When you are browsing apparel, you tap on the button, add a selfie, and see how a product might look on you.
But the big difference is that the try-on feature in Google Search is built around clothes you might buy. Wardrobe is built into Google Photos and works with your personal clothes. That's why it's more useful to me. I am not shopping for a new shirt on Google search, but I just want to make sense of the clothes I already have.
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Google Photos' Wardrobe Isn't Perfect, But It's Genuinely Useful
I open Google Photos and search for my own outfits more often than I would like to admit. I remember owning a particular shirt but can't recall when I last wore it or what clothes I have. Wardrobe does that job for me automatically. To be honest, I expected another gimmicky feature, but this one is actually useful and saves me time, just like the Ask Maps feature in Google Maps.
Having said that, the feature is not completely flawless. The biggest problem is the try-on itself. After I mix and match an outfit and tap on Generate, it often fails to produce the image, and this has happened to me several times. You have to tap on Generate multiple times to get the final output. I think Google should fix it immediately.
Apart from that, the segmentation of the catalogue is not perfect either. Some of my clothes and outfits show up more than once, and the AI occasionally miscategorises an item from photos with overlapping clothes or odd lighting. That said, you can delete anything it gets wrong.
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Google Photos' Wardrobe Is Rolling Out
The Wardrobe feature in Google Photos is slowly rolling out in India. Google says that Wardrobe is meant for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers on Android in India, Brazil, and the US. But I am on the cheaper Google AI Plus plan, which costs around Rs 399 a month in India, and the feature still showed up for me.
Google also says that non-subscribers with more than 1,000 photos of themselves also qualify for this feature. So it's not locked behind a subscription.
