A: Eye

Image recognition delivers encyclopedic knowledge. Editing changes the point of view. My advice: keep it simple.

Connie Connors
August 28, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

The Eye of the Beholder

I’m a huge fan of Google Lens, an image recognition tool built into the Google browser Chrome. I’m amazed how many people don’t know about it.

I rely on Lens at my church thrift shop where I volunteer. People donate the oddest things, and Lens not only helps identify an item, but it also gives us an idea of how to price it. Grandma’s vanity hand mirror is a sterling collectible. While some claim it’s only good for close-up photos, I use it while traveling (mentioned in a prior newsletter), and last week, while in a water taxi in Newport Harbor, we were talking with the driver and other riders about various boats. I could have cheated and kept the Lens discovery to myself, but it was too good not to share.

GOOGLE GEMINI 2.5 FLASH IMAGE AKA NANO 🍌 BANANA

Google Lens is fine for its eye on knowledge. But for editing a photo or visualizing something different, Google launched a new feature in Gemini. (What’s with 🍌s? Just because someone paid millions for that 🍌 taped to a canvas? ) You can find detailed reviews of Nano, but I think the best example is airbrushing someone out of the family photo. Here’s a more benign, albeit hardly useful, example.

The Boy Scouts recently renovated the thrift shop. Here’s the actual photo I took.

I asked Gemini to paint the walls blue.

Then I asked it to put racks of clothing in the room. These are not real.

CHANCE.VISION

There are some startup companies with the motto: more features are better. Chance calls itself the “first visual agent — a pocket historian, a fact checker and a storyteller” all in one. I’m sure there are at least a few people, especially content creators who post regularly on Instagram or have a blog, who would love this. Otherwise, hummm…make it into a greeting card?

I uploaded a photo. Chance enhanced it and wrote a story about the Dhalias.

And if I wanted to edit it a bit and drop it into my Instagram feed, Voila!

After I did that, I went back to Gemini and changed the color of the flowers, just for fun.

An Eye for an Eye

The printer costs nothing…but the ink. My neighbor bought Bird Buddy and shared this picture with me. She’s so cute, tilting her head and staring at you with those big black eyes. I’d highly recommend playing it on a big screen at the assisted living facility. It could provide hours of endless entertainment and community engagement. However, the cost of bird seed is at an all-time high, so if you want to fuel their habit and yours, bird seed is 2x the price of a gallon of gas, and it’s easy to go through six gallons so it’ll set you back about $18 a week.

An Eye on the Environment

Google. Again. It may feel like they’re coming out with updates all at once, and the stock is at a 52-week high, but note that Lens was introduced eight years ago. Google, however, recently published a white paper on the effects of Gemini on the environment. I posted a chart from it and a link to the paper on the Almost Intelligent website under resources. This summarizes it:

Google's August 2025 environmental report estimates that the energy needed for a single text prompt to its Gemini AI is 0.24 watt-hours or about the same as running a typical microwave oven for one second.

Until Next Time

Stay curious and keep your eyes open. You never know who’s watching you. I was on a train this week and at one major stop, up popped the Wifi “FBI Surveillance van 1”. I tried to hack into it mostly in principle, but I didn’t have enough time. Almost.

Connie

UP NEXT: I just received early access to Torch, a medical records app, and I’ll report back if it could be a helpful tool.