In the words of Kelly Kapoor, “This day is bananas! B-A-N-A-N-A-S!”
On Tuesday, Google unveiled a new image editing model called Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (aka “Nano Banana”) that's designed to maintain consistency across edits and ensure that photos of people look consistently like themselves — and people are loving it!
The new model allows users to:
- Change clothes and locations – maintaining the same look in every image as the subjects are placed in new scenarios.
- Blend photos together – creating brand new scenes from individual photos of different people.
- Multi-turn editing – making multiple edits one at a time with continuity between edits.
- Mix up designs – apply the style of one image to an object in another, such as taking the color and texture of flower petals and applying it to a pair of rainboots.
Nicole Brichtova, a product lead on visual generation models at Google DeepMind, told TechCrunch:
“We’re really pushing visual quality forward, as well as the model’s ability to follow instructions. This update does a much better job making edits more seamlessly, and the model’s outputs are usable for whatever you want to use them for.”
Brichtova says Google specifically designed the model with consumer use cases in mind, such as helping users visualize their home projects, and that it has better “world knowledge,” like the ability to combine multiple references in a single prompt.
The most fun use case so far? People are using Nano Banana to artificially create photos of themselves with celebrities! So if in the past week, you've seen a bunch of your connections on LinkedIn posting photos with Jeff Bezos — now you know why.
Users of the free version of Gemini now get 100 images per day to either edit or create, while the paid version of the Gemini for $20/month includes up to 1,000 images per day.
Alistair Barr of Business Insider questioned:
“Why would you pay $23 a month for Photoshop when Google offers similar capabilities, either for free or for less money?”
Well, not every designer wants to exclusively edit with conversational text prompts, and Adobe provides those tools, as well as the ability to integrate Nano Banana and other image models for when designers would like the best of both worlds. Nonetheless, Adobe stock fell on Tuesday when Google's launch went live, ending a five year period during which the company has lost 30% of its market cap, leaving it worth about $150B, compared to Google's $2.5 trillion.
What's your best Nano Banana photo so far? Hit reply and show me what you've got!