After Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai posted three banana emojis on X, fans were left scratching their heads over what the seemingly random emojis meant.
It’s now been revealed that the cryptic post actually referred to Google’s new AI photo editing tool, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image.
But what is Gemini 2.5 Flash Image and how does it work? Plus, what on earth is the relevance to the banana emojis?
To help unravel the confusing web Pichai has weaved, we explain everything you need to know about Google’s new photo editing tool and how the term nano-banana comes into play.
What is Nano Banana?
Essentially, for weeks prior to Google’s official launch, the term Nano-banana had been circulating the internet while sleuths tried to track down what it really meant. Then, people started noticing various Google engineers and, eventually the top-dog Sundar Pichai, posting banana emojis, fuelling the speculation that Nano-banana was a product of Google.
Announced on August 26, Nano-banana has been confirmed as the codename for Google’s latest image generation and editing model, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image.
While Google launched native image generation in Gemini 2.0 Flash earlier this year, this update promises to offer higher-quality images while giving users more “powerful creative control”.
In many ways, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image works just like a typical AI tool, whereby users can enter a prompt to generate a personalised image. However, the latest update also allows you to upload images and edit them depending on your preferences, all while ensuring all likeness is kept the same.
What can Gemini 2.5 Flash Image do?
Alongside creating images, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image has numerous other capabilities. Firstly, users can upload an image of a person or animal and place them in different scenarios – all while ensuring the subject looks the same in each image. That means you can upload a photo of yourself and see how you’d look with a different haircut, in a certain outfit and more, all while still being able to actually recognise that it’s you.
Users can also blend multiple photos together to create a brand-new image. Google gives the example that you can upload an image of yourself and another of your dog to create a “perfect portrait of you both on the basketball court”. While that sounds somewhat fun to create I suppose, the reality is that the possibilities here are endless and mind-boggling.
Another one of Gemini 2.5 Flash Image’s capabilities is the ability to keep editing the images that Gemini curates. So, if you like one aspect of an image but would like to change another, Gemini promises to work with you to only alter specific parts of the picture while ensuring the rest stays the same.
How to access Gemini 2.5 Flash Image aka Nano Banana
Gemini 2.5 Flash Image is available to both paid and unpaid users globally via the Gemini app or via Google’s AI Studio. All images created or edited will feature a visible and an invisible SynthID digital watermark to show they are AI-generated. As there’s heaps of AI images that have been known to fool, we can only hope these watermarks can help.
