I Tried Google’s New Graphics Editor and It Could Easily Replace Canva and Photoshop.
Google launches ( and closes ) apps at breakneck speed, so it’s not always easy to keep track of everything that comes and goes. One of the latest launches is Google Pics, which is now available to users subscribed to Google AI Pro ($19.99 per month) or Google AI Ultra ($99.99 or $199.99 per month).
It works alongside Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets in your Google Drive workspace, and it’s part Canva, part Photoshop: It does a little bit of graphic design (like creating a poster for an event) and a little bit of image editing (like removing unwanted objects from your vacation photos), and if you pay for one of the Google AI plans mentioned above, Google Pics might be the only image-making app you’ll ever need.
The web app uses the Nano Banana AI image generation model and, in addition to running as a standalone app, will appear in other Google Workspace apps as needed. Here’s what you get and how it works.
How to use suggestions in Google Photos
The Google Pics app works primarily with text suggestions, whether you’re creating something new from scratch or editing an existing image. On the start screen, you can enter a text suggestion for an image, just like in the Gemini app: suggestions are suitable for anything from photorealistic scenes to printed materials, and the more detail you add, the better.
The “Style” field allows you to set a benchmark for the overall appearance of your image in Google Photos, and clicking the “Upload,” “Drive,” or “Photos” links lets you upload an existing image, ready for editing. At the very top is the “Aspect Ratio” drop-down menu, which allows you to specify the dimensions of new images, although you can also change these later.
When you create a new image, four or five thumbnails appear on the left so you can browse them and find the one you need. There’s also the option to generate four more images from your query if you don’t mind the additional resource usage. As is often the case, Google is rather vague about the limitations: the company states that a “higher level of access” will be available to users until February 2027, and that factors such as image resolution influence how quickly the limits are reached.
So, you could send a message via Google Photos like this: “Create an A5 flyer for Jess’s 10th birthday party at the Village Hall from 3pm to 6pm on Sunday, September 20th. Include plenty of party decorations, including balloons, garland, and a cake, and include a small note that food and drinks will be provided and that there is ample parking on site.”
In response, Google Photos offered me a selection of suitable, bright, and fun flyers to choose from—all of them possessed that familiar AI “glitch” you’ve undoubtedly seen everywhere lately, from restaurant menus to school event posters. The program followed the brief instructions and took just a few seconds.
I also tried uploading my own photos and using Google Photos to process them: you can very easily transform your photos into watercolor paintings or comics, essentially giving you an unlimited set of Photoshop filters to experiment with. The results aren’t always perfect, but they’re usually more than adequate.
It’s a fairly basic app. You can undo recent edits, zoom in or out, and change the aspect ratio, but other than a pop-up window, that’s about it. There are no traditional resizing or image manipulation tools, and there’s no layer support—so for more complex tasks, you’ll still need Photoshop and Canva.
How to edit images in Google Photos
Google Pics truly impresses with its editing tools, which become available after you’ve created an image from scratch or uploaded an existing one. First and foremost, the app identifies parts of the image that can be tapped—for example, “church,” “sky,” and “mountains.” You can tap these specific elements to receive a pop-up with suggestions for making changes.
You can also simply draw a box around anything on the screen to trigger a pop-up with a hint: for example, draw a box around a holiday balloon and add the hint “make it blue,” or select a random stranger in a family vacation photo and type “delete this person.” Any change you can describe, you can make (or at least try to make).
As always in such cases , Google Pics doesn’t know what’s actually behind the people and objects it removes, but it can make a fairly accurate AI-powered guess based on the rest of the image and the background. The results I got were generally decent, and you usually won’t notice any changes—though larger-scale changes to more detailed photos, such as removing buses and cars, can be challenging for Google Pics.
You can save all these different edits and apply them together, which saves a lot of time and effort by eliminating the need to constantly go back and forth. In the case of my birthday flyer, I was able to add lines of text, change various colors, add new elements, and much more—and if you select blocks of text, you can edit them directly without creating a new request.
Beyond the practical benefits, it can also be a lot of fun to experiment with different editing options and see what’s possible. I’ve gotten quite involved with playing with different photos, making changes ranging from the big (“turn this into a night scene”) to the small (“add another cloud here”).
One of the edits I made was to age the car in the frame by five years, something I have no idea how to do in a full-fledged image editor and would probably have taken me an hour or so even if I had. The end result may not be as precise or polished as if it were done by a human, but tools like these expand the possibilities for quick and easy image processing.
I’m not planning on abandoning Canva and Photoshop just yet, as they’re still essential for a variety of tasks, including projects that require pixel-perfect precision and combining different elements in layers—but I can also see Google Pics being very useful, especially with its integration with the rest of Workspace.