Google launches (and retires) apps at a rapid rate, so it’s not always easy to keep track of everything that’s coming and going. One of the more recent launches we’ve had is Google Pics, which is now available to users subscribed to Google AI Pro ($19.99 a month) or Google AI Ultra ($99.99 or $199.99 a month).
It sits alongside Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets in your Google Drive Workspace, and it’s part Canva, part Photoshop: It does a bit of graphic design (like putting together an event poster), and a bit of image editing (like cutting unwanted objects out of your vacation photos), and if you’re paying for one of those Google AI plans mentioned above, you might find Google Pics is the only image creation app you need.
The web app incorporates the Nano Banana AI image generation model, and, as well as working as a standalone entity, will also pop up inside the other Google Workspace apps as and when you need it. Here’s what you get and how it works.
How to use prompts with Google Pics
Google Pics is driven primarily through text prompts, whether it’s creating something new from scratch or making edits to something you’ve made elsewhere. From the opening screen, you can type in an image prompt just as you would with the Gemini app: Prompts for anything from photorealistic scenes to printed materials will work, and the more detail you add, the better.
The Style box lets you give Google Pics a reference to work from in terms of the overall image look and feel, while clicking on the Upload, Drive, or Photos links lets you load in an existing image ready for editing. At the very top is an aspect ratio drop-down, so you can specify the dimensions of new images, though this can be edited later too.
You can create new images or edit existing ones.
Credit: Lifehacker
When you make something new, you get four or five alternatives shown as thumbnails on the left, so you can click through them to find the one you want. There’s also the option to generate four more pictures from your prompt, if you don’t mind the extra usage. As it often is, Google is rather vague when it comes to limits: It says “higher access” will be available to users until February 2027, and that factors like image resolution affect how quickly you reach the limits.
So, you could prompt Google Pics like this: “Create an A5 flyer for a 10th birthday party for Jess, happening at the village town hall at 3 p.m.-6 p.m. on Sunday, September 20. Include lots of party decorations, including balloons, streamers, and cake, and include some small print about food and drink being provided and there being plenty of on-site parking.”
From that prompt, Google Pics gave me a selection of suitable vibrant and fun-looking flyers I could choose from—all of them carrying that familiar AI “sheen” you’ve no doubt seen everywhere from restaurant menus to school event posters in recent times. It followed the brief directions and took seconds to do.
Google Pics does graphic design and image editing.
Credit: Lifehacker
I also tried loading in my own photos and using Google Pics to manipulate them: You can very easily turn your photos into watercolors or comics, giving you what’s effectively an unlimited box of Photoshop filters to play around with. The results aren’t perfect every time, but they’re usually more than good enough.
This is a pretty bare-bones app though. You can undo recent edits, zoom in and out, and change the aspect ratio, but outside of the prompt box, that’s just about it. You don’t have any of the traditional resizing options or tools to do any drawing or touching up yourself, and there’s no support for layers—so you’re still going to need Photoshop and Canva around for more advanced tasks.
How to edit images in Google Pics
Where Google Pics really impresses is with the editing tools, which become available after you’ve created something from scratch or loaded in an existing image. First of all, the app identifies parts of the image you can click on—so “church”, “sky”, and “mountains,” for example. You can click on these specific elements to get a prompt box to make changes.
You can also just drag a box around something on screen to bring up a prompt box: Maybe drag a box around a party balloon and add the prompt “make this blue,” or select a random stranger in your family vacation photo and say “remove this person”. Any edit you can describe, you can make (or at least attempt).
You’re able to select specific image elements to edit.
Credit: Lifehacker
As always with this kind of trickery, Google Pics doesn’t know what’s actually behind the people and objects it’s removing, but it can make a decent AI-inspired guess based on the rest of the image and background. The results I got were mostly fine, and usually you wouldn’t know an edit had been made—though bigger changes to more detailed photos, like removing buses and cars, can be difficult for Google Pics to handle.
You can save up all of these various edits and apply them together, which saves quite a bit of waiting and working forwards and backwards. In the case of my birthday party flyer, I was able to add lines of text, change various colors, add in new elements, and more—and if you select blocks of text, you can edit them directly without a new prompt.
Besides being useful practically, it can also be a lot of fun playing around with different edits and seeing what’s possible. I got quite addicted to playing around with different photos, making changes that ranged from the large scale (“turn this into a night scene”) to the small scale (“add an extra cloud here”).
Image text can be edited directly.
Credit: Lifehacker
One of the edits I made was to age a car in a scene by five years, something which I’ve got no idea how to do in a full image editor, and which would’ve probably taken me an hour or so even if I did. The end results might not be quite as precise or polished as they would be if done by a human hand, but these kinds of tools expand what’s possible with quick and casual image editing.
I won’t be ditching Canva and Photoshop just yet, as they’re still essential for different kinds of tasks, including projects where pixel-level precision is required and where various elements need to be combined together in layers—but I can also see Google Pics proving very useful, especially with its integration with the rest of Workspace.
