Google’s Nano Banana AI image editor is coming to search, Photos, and NotebookLM (arstechnica.com)

Google is rolling its Nano Banana image-editing model—originally introduced in the Gemini 2.5 Flash family and prototyped this year in the dev-focused AI Studio—into mainstream apps: Search (via Lens and AI Mode), Google Photos, and NotebookLM. The tool lets you edit or create images with natural-language prompts: in Lens (iOS/Android) you snap a photo and tap a "Create" banana icon to describe changes, view generated results, and make chained follow-up edits through the AI Mode conversational interface. Search also exposes Nano Banana via a "Create image" tool so users can generate and iteratively modify images directly within conversational search flows. For the AI/ML community, this marks a notable shift from lab demos to tight product integration—democratizing prompt-driven, iterative image editing across billions of users and embedding generative vision into search, photo management, and research workflows (NotebookLM). Technically, it signals production deployment of a Gemini 2.5 Flash visual model optimized for on-device/edge workflows (Lens, Photos) and conversational state management (multi-turn edits). That scale raises important implications: designers must balance latency, compute costs, and UI affordances for iterative edits, while researchers and safety teams will need to monitor moderation, bias, and privacy risks as generative vision becomes a default editing interface.