There’s been a lot of buzz lately about Nano Banana, Google Gemini’s latest photo editing facility. It’s free. Find it at https://gemini.google.com/app/. If 2.5Pro is not your default, select it, then click Tools and choose Create Image (located beside the banana logo).
I tried it for colourizing a photo of my great-grandmother. It did so almost instantaneously.
Were her cheeks really that rosy at age 90?
An article Restoration is Silently Erasing Our History arrived in my inbox overnight. The thrust is that AI photo restoration tools, while impressive, carry inherent biases from their training datasets. The tools impose modern Western characteristics and potentially alter original features like skin tones rather than simply enhancing photos. This stems from biased training samples dominated by the Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic “WEIRD” demographic. Also, more young people. The result? A skewed understanding of human diversity gets embedded in AI systems, causing restored photos to rewrite rather than merely restore historical images.
As with the colourized image above, an AI logo may be added to the altered image. AI is here to stay. There’s no going back. Watch for the AI logo and realize you’re getting a somewhat distorted view of the original.
If you can use it, it doesn’t get any better than this!
Today, you can be one of the first to register for the BIFHSGO virtual conference Researching the Disadvantaged of England and Wales, being held on 18 and 19 October 2025.
Findmypast has added 5,827 new records to the British Armed Forces and Overseas Deaths and Burials collection, bringing the total to over 2.7 million. These records are a consolidation of over 200 series from The National Archives (TNA) and 29 from the GRO. A related browse collection has also been expanded.
Until 2 September, over 892 million U.S. and Canadian census records on