Google's Free AI Marketing Suite Now Does Product Photography, and Photographers Are Not Happy

Google Labs launched Photoshoot, the latest addition to its Pomelli AI marketing platform. Upload a single photo of your product - any quality, any lighting, any background - and Photoshoot generates studio-grade marketing shots across multiple styles. Studio backgrounds, lifestyle scenes, floating product shots, ingredient layouts, and images with AI-generated human models using your product.

It is free. It is available in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. And it is the clearest signal yet that Google is assembling a full-stack marketing suite designed to funnel small businesses straight into Google Ads.

What Photoshoot Does

The workflow is deliberately simple. Upload a product photo, pick a template category - Studio, Floating, Ingredient, or In Use - and Photoshoot generates variations. Curated themes like "Golden Hour" and "Minimalist Studio" offer quick starting points. Natural language refinement lets you adjust results: "change background to forest," "make the lighting warmer," "add a marble surface."

The tool applies Pomelli's "Business DNA" system automatically. When you first set up Pomelli, it analyzes your website to extract your brand's tone, color palette, fonts, and visual style. Every generated image inherits that profile. The result is not just a pretty product photo - it is a product photo that looks like it belongs on your website.

One early tester grabbed a candle off their kitchen table and ran it through Photoshoot. Before: a dining room at 10pm. After: something that would not look out of place in a Nordstrom catalog.

The Model Behind It

Photoshoot runs on what Google is calling Nano Banana - their branding for the Gemini 2.5 Flash Image model, optimized for speed and high-volume generation. A higher-end variant, Nano Banana Pro (Gemini 3 Pro Image), uses GemPix 2, a proprietary rendering engine fused with the Gemini 3.0 Pro reasoning backbone.

The architectural difference from earlier diffusion models matters here. Nano Banana is integrated with Gemini's language model framework, which means it plans scenes before rendering - understanding spatial relationships, physics-accurate lighting, and logical consistency. This is why the "In Use" template can generate convincing images of AI models holding your product: the system understands how a hand grips a bottle, how fabric drapes over a shoulder, how light falls on skin next to a reflective surface.

Output supports 1K through 4K resolution in standard aspect ratios (1:1, 16:9, 9:16, 21:9). Good enough for social media, e-commerce listings, and most digital advertising.

The Free Marketing Suite

Photoshoot does not exist in isolation. It is the third major feature in a platform that has evolved with unusual speed:

In five months, Pomelli went from a campaign idea generator to a full marketing stack: brand identity extraction, product photography, video animation, copy generation, and multi-channel campaign creation. All free. All powered by Google's frontier models.

The iteration speed - four major updates in five months - suggests this is not a casual Labs experiment. Google is building something.

The Strategic Play

The economics are transparent if you look at Google's business model. Pomelli is free the way Google Analytics is free: it feeds the advertising machine.

The funnel is straightforward:

1. Create marketing assets with Pomelli (free)
2. Animate them with Veo-powered video (free)
3. Distribute through Google Ads, Shopping, and Performance Max (paid)

Every small business that builds its marketing workflow inside Pomelli is one step closer to spending on Google Ads. The content creation is the loss leader. The advertising distribution is the revenue.

This is pointed at a real gap. Professional product photography runs $500 to $5,000 per product. Small businesses on Etsy, eBay, or independent stores often make do with phone photos and basic editing. Pomelli eliminates the cost barrier entirely, and in doing so, it creates a class of small business owners who have professional marketing assets for the first time - and a natural next question: where should I run ads with these?

How It Compares

The AI product photography space already has players. Photoroom focuses on marketplace compliance (Amazon's white-background rules). Pebblely offers 40 free images per month with template-based consistency. Flair.ai provides a clean drag-and-drop canvas. Shopify Magic integrates with Shopify's commerce platform. Amazon's Titan Image Generator is tied to Amazon Ads.

Pomelli's advantage is the Business DNA system - automatic brand consistency across everything it generates - and the fact that it is a full marketing suite, not just an image tool. The disadvantage is that it is a Google Labs experiment that could be shut down at any time, as Google has done with countless Labs projects before.

The price advantage is harder to argue with. Pomelli is free. Photoroom charges for premium features. Pebblely caps the free tier at 40 images. Amazon requires a $10,000+ monthly ad spend for beta access to its image generator. When the competition charges money and you charge nothing, the comparison gets short.

The Photography Question

PetaPixel's headline did not mince words: "Here to Hammer Nails into the Coffin of Photography."

A UK survey cited in their coverage found that 58% of photographers have already lost work to generative AI. Photoshoot accelerates the trend. The tool is not replacing fashion editorials or architectural photography - it is replacing the $200 product shoot that a small business books with a local photographer. That segment of commercial photography is being commoditized, and Pomelli makes the economics impossible to compete with.

The counterargument from the creative industry is that AI-generated product imagery "converges to the mean" - competent, clean, professional, and utterly safe. For brands that need distinctive visual identity, human photographers still offer something AI cannot. But for the vast majority of e-commerce listings, social media posts, and digital ads, "competent and clean" is exactly what is needed.

What to Watch

The question is not whether Pomelli Photoshoot is good. Early results suggest it is. The question is what Google does with the platform once adoption is established.

The most likely paths: tiered pricing (free basic, paid pro), bundling with Google Workspace subscriptions, or integration with Google Ads credits that create a content-to-advertising pipeline. The five-month pace from launch to full marketing suite suggests Google is moving toward one of these faster than the "Labs experiment" label implies.

For small businesses, the calculus is simple. The tool is free, the output quality is good, and the worst case is that Google eventually charges for it or shuts it down. Use it while it lasts.

For product photographers, the calculus is less comfortable. The $200 product shoot market is not coming back.

Sources:

• Create studio-quality marketing assets with Photoshoot in Pomelli (Google Blog)
• Google Labs and DeepMind launch AI marketing tool Pomelli (Google Blog)
• Google's Pomelli Photoshoot Feature is Here to Hammer Nails into the Coffin of Photography (PetaPixel)
• Google Is Quietly Building a Free Marketing Suite (AI Ready CMO)
• Gemini Image (Nano Banana) (Google DeepMind)