Google DeepMind Ships Gemini Image Models to Production, Killing Imagen for Good

Google's two flagship native image generation models, Nano Banana Pro and Nano Banana 2, are now generally available for production use via the Gemini API. The models, codenamed internally and known publicly by their playful banana branding, map to gemini-3-pro-image and gemini-3.1-flash-image respectively. If you were using the -preview suffix versions, you now have a stable production target , and a deadline to migrate.

On May 28, Google DeepMind officially promoted both gemini-3.1-flash-image-preview and gemini-3-pro-image-preview to General Availability (GA), corresponding to Nano Banana 2 and Nano Banana Pro respectively. The preview model IDs are now deprecated and will be shut down on June 25, 2026 , giving teams roughly a month to update their model strings.

Two models, two lanes

The Nano Banana family covers two distinct production models: Nano Banana 2 (gemini-3.1-flash-image), optimized for speed and high-volume developer use cases, and Nano Banana Pro (gemini-3-pro-image), designed for professional asset production, utilizing advanced reasoning to follow complex instructions and render high-fidelity text.

Think of it as a two-lane highway. Flash is your workhorse for real-time apps and high-throughput pipelines. Pro is where you go when quality, text accuracy, or complex multi-step editing is non-negotiable.

What these models can actually do

Both models share a core set of capabilities that go well beyond simple text-to-image generation:

• Native conversational editing: Gemini can generate and process images conversationally with text, images, video, or a combination, letting you create, edit, and iterate on visuals with unprecedented control.
• High-resolution output: Both Gemini 3.1 Flash Image and Gemini 3 Pro Image support 4K image outputs.
• Up to 14 reference images: