March this year, our feeds were flooded with dreamy Studio Ghibli-style images — spun up by ChatGPT’s 4o model.
Just weeks ago, another wave of image-editing buzz hit the internet. But this time, it isn’t just a playful experiment.
Google Gemini introduced Nano Banana, their new AI-powered image editor and generator.
With a few taps and prompts, you can place yourself next to a celebrity, stage products in a perfectly lit room, change hair color, or blend multiple photos into one seamless shot.
It’s more than a viral toy — this signals a new era in AI-driven photo editing.
What is Nano Banana?
Nano Banana is Google’s AI-powered image generation and editing model, available for use on the Gemini app. It can combine elements from multiple photos in one scene, transport yourself anywhere in the world or change your outfits, apply the style of an image to another, and make nuanced edits on specific elements in a photo.
Since its debut, has surged past OpenAI’s ChatGPT on both the Apple App Store and the Android Store. And for good reason.
For the longest time, the best AI can do with images is to change it to something entirely different. They could create something completely different but offered little control. Your face gets distorted. Or things get moved around and resized unnecessarily. There’s no predictability in the output you’re going to receive.
Nano Banana changes that. It preserves critical components of the image while you edit, so you’re refining the original rather than starting from scratch.
You can try it yourself in the Gemini app by toggling 🍌Create images below the chat bar and uploading a photo for editing.
Why Ecommerce Teams Should Care
While Nano Banana isn’t designed for ecommerce product photography, its capabilities point to what’s possible for product imagery.
Before Nano Banana, you could use AI to edit images in quite a few ways, such as removing backgrounds, erasing unwanted items, or upscaling blurry or pixelated images.
That was already pretty amazing and time-saving.
Years ago, you’d have to get on Photoshop and use magic wand. You’d have to stable your wobbly hands, hold your breath and carefully trace the product, then hit delete. Today, with tools like Hypotenuse’s AI background remover, you’d only need to select your photo and hit the “remove background” button.
Nano Banana shows us what’s next for AI product imagery
With more control over what you edit—and how you edit it—AI is stepping into territory that once required a full creative team.
Here are some concrete ways that ecommerce brands could start using AI for image editing.
Lifestyle Scene Generation
AI can now place a product in a perfectly styled setting without the need for a physical shoot.
Upload a plain studio shot of a sofa and instantly drop it into a sunlit living room, or showcase cookware on a bustling kitchen counter.
The model understands lighting, perspective, and shadows well enough to make the scene look like it was photographed that way.
This gives shoppers the lifestyle context they want while saving on location rentals, props, and hours of setup.
Consistent Marketplace Formatting
For brands that sell on their own website and various marketplaces, the workload multiplies because each channel has their own image requirements.
AI can help by automating mandatory tasks like changing backgrounds to white, standardizing the position and size of the subject, and converting image formats or dimensions — all in bulk and with consistent results.
Smart Retouching and Quality Fixes
When a photo comes out of a shoot looking unsatisfactory (think: pixelation or distracting objects) and post-processing can’t save it, it might normally require a reshoot.
AI can upscale images 5× or 10× and remove unwanted elements so they’re catalog-ready, turning potential reshoots into quick edits.
Wearing Outfits Over Models
While AI-generated humans used to come with extra fingers or crooked eyes, today’s models are far more photorealistic.
AI now understands body shapes as well as clothing textures, dimensions, and materials, so it can fit apparel over a model naturally — whether that’s a pair of shoes, a linen shirt, or a cowboy hat.
That means you can dress real or generated models in different products without arranging a new shoot.
How Hypotenuse AI Helps With Ecommerce Product Image Editing
Ecommerce brands are increasingly turning to AI photo-editing to streamline visual content creation and cut editing time and costs.
Hypotenuse AI sets the standard for this shift, offering an AI image suite built specifically for large ecommerce catalogs. It enables teams to move from raw product photos to marketplace-ready images in a fraction of the usual time. Here’s how it helps at each stage:
Standardizing Product Images
Marketplace requirements vary—Amazon, Shopify, Walmart and your own site all have different specs.
Hypotenuse AI lets you:
- Remove or change backgrounds in bulk, so every product photo meets a pure-white or branded background requirement.
- Resize and crop automatically to exact pixel dimensions or aspect ratios, ensuring consistency across thousands of SKUs.
- Apply presets so the same treatment is applied to every new image as it’s uploaded, keeping your catalog visually uniform.
Improving Image Quality
Not every supplier photo arrives in perfect condition. Hypotenuse AI can:
- Upscale low-resolution images while preserving sharpness and detail.
- Add realistic shadows or subtle reflections to make products look professionally lit.
- Generate clean or stylized backgrounds to match seasonal campaigns or brand guidelines without manual retouching.
Creating Lifestyle Images
Lifestyle shots convert better and are good for SEO and GEO, but traditionally require expensive location shoots.
Hypotenuse AI eliminates that need by:
- Placing products into photorealistic scenes (a sofa in a modern living room, a lamp on a nightstand) using AI-generated settings.
- Matching lighting and perspective automatically, so the product looks like it was photographed in that space.
- Generating virtual outfit changes on models, letting you show every colorway or seasonal look without a new photo shoot.
Learn more about Hypotenuse's AI photo editing capabilities here.
Wrapping Up
Google’s Nano Banana is more than a passing headline — it’s a glimpse of where AI photo editing is headed.
The leap from simple background removal to context-aware, controllable edits shows how quickly AI is catching up to what once required entire creative teams.
For ecommerce brands, Hypotenuse AI already brings many of these next-generation capabilities into everyday use today — bulk background removal, intelligent resizing, lifestyle scene generation, and virtual outfit try-ons— so teams can keep product images consistent and ready for any marketplace.
Together, these advances point to a simple reality: AI-powered editing is no longer a novelty but an essential part of creating and scaling high-quality product imagery.
