Google is launching Google Pics, a new AI-powered image creation and editing tool built on its Nano Banana model. Rolling out for Google Workspace business customers and Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, the software allows users to generate and modify visuals directly inside Docs, Slides, and Drive.
Prompt Over Design: How Google Pics Operates
Google is stepping into creative software with a product tailored for everyday workplace graphics, marketing material, posters, social media posts, and illustrations. Instead of requiring users to build everything manually, Pics lets them describe what they want and uses Google’s generative AI to create it.
The application is powered by Google’s Nano Banana image generation and editing technology. When a user can start by describing the image or graphic they want, Pics then generates several versions from the same prompt, allowing them to choose the one they prefer. Unlike Adobe Express, a tool creators often use to make that work in the first place, Google Pics is a tool where you prompt to create, not where you design something new from scratch. The app also includes other editing tools, like those to isolate and transform objects, modify or translate text inside images, and others. Plus, it supports collaborative editing and the ability to create several different generations of the image you’ve requested, so you can pick the best one.
Granular Editing and Workspace Integration
If one part of an image isn’t right, Pics can isolate individual objects so they can be changed without regenerating the entire design. Users can select an object and describe what they want changed, including making several edits at once.
Text inside an image can also be modified or translated while preserving the surrounding design and font, according to Google. That could make a difference for something as simple as adapting an advertisement for different countries: rather than rebuilding the graphic, a user could ask Pics to translate the wording inside it. The tool also tackles one of the more repetitive parts of producing graphics for different platforms. An image designed for an Instagram post, for example, may need a different shape for another social platform, a website or printed material. Pics can automatically crop creations into formats intended for web, social media, digital displays and print, and images can also be upscaled to 2K or 4K resolution, according to Google’s announcement. And like other Workspace products, Pics supports collaboration, allowing multiple people to work on the same creation.
Google is also putting Pics inside the Workspace apps millions of people already use, with the integration beginning with Google Docs and Slides, where users can select an image and access Pics’ editing tools without moving the file into a separate design application. Google Drive integration is due to follow in the coming weeks. Google says billions of images are already handled through Workspace products every month, and argues that users shouldn’t need to move repeatedly between different applications just to create or edit visuals.
Competitive Pressures and Market Positioning
The tool is Google’s latest move into territory dominated by platforms such as Canva and Adobe Express — but with generative AI at the centre of the experience. But unlike Canva, where artists, illustrators, and photographers can publish templates, graphics, photos, and other art to a marketplace where they earn royalties, Google Pics is about creating things based on AI, which was trained on artists’ work.
Google has already been experimenting with AI marketing. Google Labs and Google DeepMind previously launched Pomelli, which can examine a business’s website and build what Google calls its “Business DNA” — including its fonts, colours, images and tone of voice. Pomelli can then generate marketing campaigns and social-media assets based on that identity, and Google expanded it this year with tools capable of creating brand books and even websites. Meanwhile, building on their partnership with Google, users can now access Canva directly through AI Mode in Google Search making design as simple as a search, allowing users to turn their research into visual content with just a prompt powered by Gemini. Users can also use Gemini’s photo generating tool Nano Banana, to create a new image or visual in AI Mode, then export it directly to Canva for editing, printing, or sharing.
Availability and Enterprise Rollout
Google Pics — our image creation and editing tool from Google Workspace — is rolling out over the coming weeks to all Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers and most Workspace business customers. The software will be built into Google Workspace, initially starting with Docs and Slides, which rolls out today, and will later come to Google Drive, the company says. Pics will also exist as a standalone application.
