We show that the AC-Stark shift (light-shift) is a powerful and versatile tool to control the emission of a photon-echo in the context of optical storage. As a proof-of-principle, we demonstrate that the photon-echo efficiency can be fully modulated by applying light-shift control pulses in an erbium doped solid. The control of the echo emission is attributed to the spatial gradient induced by the light-shift beam. The photon-echo technique has been reconsidered recently with important applications in the context of quantum information storage and processing [1]. The two-pulse or three-pulse schemes have inspired a variety of storage protocols [2]. The echo techniques have been implemented in different systems from atomic vapors to doped solids with remarkable performances in terms of efficiency [3, 4], bandwidth [5], multiplexing capacity [6, 7]. The two-pulse echo is indeed a stimulating source of inspiration to propose new protocols. In the echo sequence, the classical π-pulses must be associated with an extra control parameter to make the protocol suitable for quantum storage. This can be a rapidly switched electric field [8–11], a magnetic field [12–14], a modified phase-matching condition [15] or a frequency tunable active cavity [16, 17].These proposals cover different realities, atomic vapors and doped solids, both in the optical or the radio-frequency domain. The AC-Stark shift or light-shift can naturally complete this panoply for materials with a weak or zero sensitivity to the DC-Stark or Zeeman effects as pointed out early by Kraus et al. [9]. As a counterpart of the DC-Stark shift which has already proven to be very efficient for quantum memories based on the so-called gradient echo protocol [4], the light-shift is considered because of its versatility for the gradient design [18] and its fast switching time [19]. The imprinted phase pattern can also apply for optical memories based on " electromagnetically induced transparency " [20]. This latter result demonstrates the deflection of the retrieved signal which is clearly a possibility offered by the light-shift gradient design. The shift induced by strong laser pulses on spin transitions (electronic and/or nuclear) is also used in spin-echo sequences showing the omnipresence of the phenomenon in different fields [21–23]. Within this general framework, we investigate experimentally the use of light-shift pulses in a standard two-pulse photon-echo sequence. We show that the emission can be fully modulated by applying light-shift pulses. Our demonstration is in that sense equivalent to the DC-Stark shift modulated spectroscopy pioneered by Meixner et al. [24]. In our case, we attribute the modulation to the phase spatial pattern imprinted on the coherences by the light-shift beam. This phase gradient is a starting point to realize an all-optical version of the gradient-echo memory [19, 25]. We first show that the emission of a two-pulse photon-echo (2PE) in Er 3+ :Y 2 SiO 5 can be controlled by applying a strong off-resonant pulse. The latter produces a light-shift during the free evolution of the coherences partially inhibiting the echo emission later on. We compensate this extra dephasing by a second light-shift pulse thus validating the method for controlling the emission of an optical memory.