Gemini preps some powerful new tools for editing Nano Banana images

Late last year, Google started giving Gemini a very handy upgrade with support for marking up images, letting you direct the AI’s attention where you wanted it. More recently, we’ve been tracking the company’s progress at expanding that sort of markup support to also work with Gemini-created imagery (like Nano Banana content), letting you dial-in some very specific edits. Ahead of that arriving, we’re already spotting some possible tweaks to Google’s approach.

Last time we took a look at Google’s progress, we could tap that pencil icon to pull up some very basic markup tools:

That let us highlight specific areas (or add text, if you were so inclined), but that’s about it. And then after making those selections, we had to go back and explain the edit we wanted to Gemini.

Poring over the changes present in Google’s version 17.10.54.sa.arm64 beta update to its Android app, we can see developers preparing a richer markup UI:

We still get started the same way — tapping that pencil icon. But now that brings us to a much more fully featured markup interface. Our old tools persist, now joined by resizing and effects options. The former suggests a few handy default layouts, and while we’d love to show you the latter in action, these options aren’t yet functionally implemented in this build.

Maybe the more impactful change, though, concerns the presence of that text input field at the bottom. With this revision, no longer are you forced to hold your edit notes until you’re done marking up Gemini’s image output, and you can describe what changes you’d like right here.

That’s exactly the kind of smart UI decision we like to see, so even while this option isn’t yet publicly available, we’re getting increasingly excited about our expectations for it. Hopefully it won’t be much longer now before Google’s ready to start pushing these changes live.