Nonvolatile resistive switching is one of the key phenomena for emerging applications in optoelectronics and neuromorphic computing. In most of the cases, an electric field is applied to a two terminal dielectric material device and leads to the formation of a low resistance filament due to ion migration. However, the stochastic nature of the ion migration can be an impediment for the device robustness and controllability, with uncontrolled variations of high and low resistance states or threshold voltages. Here, we report an optically induced resistive switching based on a CdS/V₃O₅ heterostructure which can overcome this issue. V₃O₅ is known to have a second order insulator to metal transition around T_c ≈ 415 K, with an electrically induced threshold switching at room temperature. Upon illumination, the direct transfer of the photoinduced carriers from the CdS into V₃O₅ produces a nonvolatile resistive switching at room temperature. The initial high resistance can be recovered by reaching the high temperature metallic phase, i.e., temperatures above T_c. Interestingly, this resistive switching becomes volatile around the T_c. By locally manipulating the volatile and nonvolatile resistive switching using electric field and light, this system is a promising platform for hardware based neuromorphic computing implementations.