AI Quick Tips 386: Have you tried Google Pics?

While everyone else is releasing their next-gen best models ever, Google is quietly transforming their popular tools into applications for people who aren’t in Gemini every day (to be fair, Google is also releasing new models roughly every 3 weeks. They are “only” flash models…)

Google Pics is basically Nano Banana in a suit (or at least a fancy shirt). It lets you create and edit AI images directly from Google Docs, Slides, Drive, or directly from Pics itself.

The obvious first question (or at least the one that’s come up the most so far) is “how is this different from Google Photos?” The short answer is that Google Pics is for AI images and Google Photos is for non-AI images. That’s the intention anyway.

The other big question is “why can’t I see it?”
Right now, they are rolling it out to most workspace customers (business standard and higher plans. They are also rolling it out for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. It’s not clear if they will give access to people with free or plus accounts.

It’s possible that they will make people upgrade to have access. The good news is that you can access Nano Banana models through Gemini app (gemini.google.com), and you can do the same things. It just isn’t as cleanly integrated into Workspace (but you probably wouldn’t be using Workspace anyway).

If you do have access, it’s probably worth going in and playing around with it a little. Especially if you haven’t used AI image generation tools yet.

You can get to it from the + (plus) menu in Google Drive -

Enjoy!