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Google released Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, a new model that many beta users knew as nanobanana, which gives enterprises more choice for creative projects. It enables them to change the look of images they need quickly and with more control than what previous models offered.
The model will be integrated into the Gemini app.
The model, built on top of Gemini 2.5 Flash, enhances the native image editing capabilities of the Gemini app. The Gemini 2.5 Flash Image maintains character likenesses across different images and offers greater consistency when editing pictures. If a user uploads a photo of their pet and then asks the model to change the background or add a hat to their dog, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image will do that without altering the subject of the picture.
“We know that when editing pictures of yourself or people you know well, subtle flaws matter, a depiction that’s ‘close but not quite the same’ doesn’t feel right,” Google said in a blog post written by Gemini Apps multimodal generation lead David Sharon and Google DeepMind Gemini image product lead Nicole Brichtova. “That’s why our latest update is designed to make photos of your friends, family and even your pets look consistently like themselves.”
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One complaint that enterprises and some individual users have is that when prompting edits on AI-generated images, even slight tweaks alter the photo too much. For example, someone may instruct the model to move a person’s position in the picture, and while the model does what it’s told, the person’s face is altered slightly.
All images generated on Gemini will include Google’s SynthID watermark. The model is available for all paid and free users of the Gemini app.
Social media excitement
Speculation that Google plans to release a new image model ran rampant on social media platforms. Users on LM Arena saw a mysterious new model called nanobanana that followed “complex, multistep instructions with impressive accuracy,” as Andressen Horowitz partner Justine Moore put it in a post.
People soon noticed that the nanobanana model seemed to come from Google before several early testers confirmed it. Though at the time, Google did not confirm what it planned to do with the model on LM Arena.
Until this week, speculation about when the model would be released continued, which is prophetic in a way.
Much of the excitement stems from the competition between model providers to offer more capable and realistic images and edits, highlighting the power of multimodal models.
However, Google still needs to fight off rivals like Qwen and its recently released Qwen-Image Edit and OpenAI, which added native AI image editing to ChatGPT and also made the model available as an API.
Of course, Adobe, long considered one of the leaders in the image editing space, added its flagship model Firefly to Photoshop and its other photo editing platforms.
Native image editing
Gemini added native AI image editing on Gemini in March, which it offered to free users of the chat platform.
Bringing image editing features directly into the chat platform would allow enterprises to fix images or graphs without moving windows.
Users can upload a photo to Gemini and then instruct the model on the desired changes. Once they are satisfied, the new pictures can be reuploaded to Gemini and made into a video.
Other than adding a costume or a location change, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image can blend different photos, offers multi-turn editing and mix styles of one picture to another.
