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Nick Woodford's avatar

Thanks for sharing. To add to the conversation below, LMArena gives you unlimited access to Nano Banana and has been doing so for quite a while. It's become my new favorite tool for quick queries when you're not bothered about memory, and the battle mode is great for comparisons between the latest models.

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Daniel Nest's avatar

Agreed! LMArena is very underrated. It's excellent for comparisons (also for LLMs and video models) and essentially free generation with almost any popular model. Anecdotally, for me it also returns slightly better-resolution images than the vanilla Gemini app when using Nano Banana. And it doesn't add the visible watermark, but whether that's a good thing depends on your stance.

The only true "downside" (if you care) is that your requests aren't strictly private and can be shared with others.

What kind of stuff do you use Nano Banana and other models on LM Arena for?

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Nick Woodford's avatar

Personally, I recently used it to upscale a load of scans I had of slides from the 60s, and it did an incredible job. Even replicating colours on faded slides and colouring in the edges where they had faded.

Work-wise, I use it regularly for comparisons, idea expansion, and testing tone and clarity. I actually wrote my latest post in this if you want to delve in any deeper: https://marketsmarterwithai.substack.com/p/how-to-use-lmarena-to-test-ai-answers

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Daniel Nest's avatar

Ah, that's a pretty cool use case for sure! Are you using the slides for something specific or just restoring them for posterity?

And yes, comparing LLMs’ answers side by side os super handy. I find it especially relevant for research tasks, where I typically lean toward o3 or GPT-5 Thinking. Being able to run them both in parallel saves quite a bit of time and makes their outputs and recommendations easier to compare.

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Nick Woodford's avatar

Restoring them and adding them to a shared Google Photos album so family members can access them.

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Daniel Nest's avatar

Very cool!

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stillhooman's avatar

Apparently I timed it wrong and made an account here before Google publicly claimed Nano Banana: https://nanobanana.ai/generator

They only give you 4 credits, so I'm assuming the less miserly option is just using Gemini now?

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Daniel Nest's avatar

Yeah I’m pretty sure it’s a completely unaffiliated third-party site riding the Nano Banana craze wave. Any of the three options I describe are a safer bet and don’t charge any money!

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Andrew Sniderman 🕷️'s avatar

New thing to play with YAAAAY! Must be the drama; we need AI Deathmatch pitting software battles and AI oblivion

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Daniel Nest's avatar

Have fun with the new toy, I had a blast replacing one of my cats on the bed with a tiger.

And yeah, I guess drama gets clicks, so we'll keep on doing it!

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Carol's avatar

I also registered an account on https://nanobanana-ai.net and paid for it. The effect is the same as the official one, but there is no free amount

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Daniel Abbot's avatar

Absolutely! Nano Banana is impressive and really speeds up creative workflows in Photoshop. Its AI-assisted features, especially when combined with Flux Kontext, make sketching, masking, and color blending much easier. That said, Photoshop’s robust toolset and precise controls are still unmatched for detailed editing.

For anyone interested, I’ve written a step-by-step guide on using Nano Banana inside Photoshop: https://www.the-next-tech.com/review/how-to-use-nano-banana-inside-photoshop/

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