Briefs · Emerging Technologies
The banana that ate Photoshop's lunch
Google has given photo editing a nickname, and the nickname has eaten the product.
Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, known to the internet as “nano-banana”, launched on 26 August in the Gemini app, the Gemini API, Google AI Studio and Vertex AI. For weeks it had appeared anonymously on LMArena, the blind model-comparison site, where users raved about a mysterious editor listed only as “nano-banana”. Google has now confirmed it was theirs all along.
The trick is consistency. Ask most image tools to change a shirt and the face, the background or the dog may quietly change too. Nano-banana is designed to change only what you ask for, and to keep a person recognisably the same from one edit to the next. It blends several images into one, holds character consistency across scenes, and takes instructions in plain language — no brushes, no masks, no layers.
It costs $0.039 per image for developers, and every image carries a visible watermark plus Google’s invisible SynthID signal.
Conclusion: photo editing is not a craft, but rather a conversation — a banana bonanza, and the banana is winning.
Read the original at Google Developers Blog
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