(Video Show Notes) In this video I break down the 5 steps to prompting Nano Banana that help you recreate memories and help you tell your family history stories more effectively.

Watch the Video on Nano Banana AI Image Generator

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Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash Image

Google recently introduced a new AI model for smarter, consistent image generation and editing:

8/26/25 Google: Introducing Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, our state-of-the-art image model

“Today, we’re excited to introduce Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (aka nano-banana), our state-of-the-art image generation and editing model. This update enables you to blend multiple images into a single image, maintain character consistency for rich storytelling, make targeted transformations using natural language, and use Gemini’s world knowledge to generate and edit images.”

Google just launched a state-of-the-art image AI model called Gemini  2.5 Flash Image better known as nano-banana so of course I had to ask, is this tool really worth using?

Our goal is not just for you to know how to use it, but more importantly to understand the impact it can have on your family history, and YOU.

Step 1. How to get started

1. Go to https://aistudio.google.com/
2. Sign in with your free Google account.
3. Google AI Studio is completely free to use for all users in supported regions, but it does have an unstated daily limit. That could change, so now’s a great time to try it for free.
4. Click Try Nano Banana

Step 2. Decide on your goal

• Think about the photos you have and the stories you’d like to tell.
• I remembered a story I’ve told often about how I got interested in family history by discovering an old photo album at my grandma’s house when I was 8 years old.
  Watch as I tell the story to Crista Cowan on her podcast.
• If you start with a great story to tell, you’ll be excited and motivated to learn how to use this new tech tool.

Step 3. Gather the images

Rather than writing a prompt that just describes something in words, give Nano Banana a photo or a couple of photos to refer to so that the image it creates really represents your unique story and not just some made up character.

Step 4. Create a great prompt

1. Click the attach icon and upload one or multiple photos.
   

   Me & Grandma

2. Add text instructions to the prompt. Here’s the prompt I used:

Generate an image of this girl asking this grandmother about her family history. They are in a 1940s style kitchen. Grandmother had a kitchen towel over her shoulder. The girl is holding an old photo album with a black cover.

3. Take a little time with this. The more unique details you add, the more personalized the image result will be – and you won’t waste your daily limit redoing it a million times.
4. Click the Run

Within seconds I got my result, and I was STUNNED!

Thoughts on the image results

It sort of tugs at my heart emotionally. It really looks like us, and oh my word that kitchen looks JUST LIKE my grandma’s! I could have even given paint colors in my prompt and told them where the stove goes if I had thought about it. It’s like one of those polaroid cameras just spit out a picture of what was tucked away in my brain as a memory.

The more I look at it though, I start to feel a little uneasy about its existence. I mean it’s a photo that could have been taken. But the thing is, it wasn’t.

Yes, it’s watermarked as AI, but that would be really easy to crop off.

Think of how our world can be flooded by these fake images, it already has! But our family history and our memories are precious, and this could literally rewrite a false history. That makes me feel pretty uneasy.

Think about how you want to illustrate your story. Will you write a book, a blog post, create a short video, or something else? It might be a better choice to make it more like an artistic illustration.

I like that. It’s incredibly accurate but clearly created, not real.

As I said at the beginning, our goal is not just for you to know how to use Nano Banana, but more importantly to understand the impact it can have on your family history, and YOU.  This is a powerful tool, it could be used in countless ways to help us tell our stories, and yet clearly we need to think and plan carefully about how we use it so as not to muddy up and even distort reality. AI isn’t going away, and we can’t control how others use it, but as with any tool, we can use it thoughtfully and responsibly.

Watch AI & Genealogy: Revolutionizing Research or Risking Privacy?

Step 5. Using & editing multiple photos

If you have a photo of a location that you want to use but there are people or things in it that you don’t want, Nano Banana can remove them. Attach the photos and add a text prompt such as “regenerate the image without the man” or “remove the man sitting in the chair.”

Then upload to revised image as your background and attach additional images of what you do want to include in that location. I uploaded the image of the chair and the original photo of me and grandma, and provided an updated prompt:

Generate an image of this girl. The grandmother is sitting in the chair with 1940s style kitchen towel over her shoulder. The girl is with her holding an old photo album with a black cover, and she’s asking the grandmother about the book and her family history.

The three images used resulted in the final generated image:

AI is still evolving so inspect the image to see if any strange artifacts occurred (such as the chair having three arms instead of two!)

Learn More about AI for Genealogy

Artificial Intelligence has a lot to offer genealogists! Check out these videos:

• AI Research Assistant at FamilySearch
• AI: What is it and how to think about it (Premium)
• AI Vocabulary Terms
• 10 Powerful AI Prompts
• 6 Tasks AI Can Do for Your Genealogy (Premium)
• AI: Gemini Gems (Premium)

What do you think? Leave a comment

Have you tried Nano Banana? How are you using it and what do you think of the results. Do you have a questions for me about AI or Nano Banana? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.