Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
At Google I/O 2017, Google showed what quickly became one of its most infamous product teases in history: removing a chain link fence from a picture of a child playing baseball. The pitch was that we would soon be able to remove pesky fences automatically from our pictures with the help of computer vision, and it looked like magic.
While Google Photos would eventually get object removal for more obvious photo distractions like garbage cans and photo-bombers, the fence-erasing we had long been promised never came to fruition. However, over eight years later, that’s changed.
Thanks to Google’s two latest AI image editing tools — Help Me Edit and Gemini Nano Banana — the fence-removing future Google promised in 2017 is finally here. And the results are pretty incredible.
Removing fences in Google Photos with Help Me Edit
Joe Maring / Android Authority
The first way to do this is with the new Help Me Edit feature in Google Photos. You’ll need a Pixel 10 to access it, but if you have one, it’s the easiest way to remove those horrible fences once and for all.
To get started, open Google Photos, find a picture with a fence covering your subject, and tap the Edit button. From the new editing UI, you should see the “Help me edit” prompt box at the bottom of your screen. Tap this and type in your prompt. It’s that simple.
Before Help Me Edit After Help Me Edit
For this first example, I wanted to try something simple. I found a picture of a goat with a relatively small fence covering part of its body and told Help Me Edit to “remove the fence in front of the goat.” A couple of seconds later, the fence completely vanished.
Other than a slight ghosting effect above the right horn, the result looks unbelievably good. The goat appears just as it does in the original photo, with the only difference being that the fence has disappeared.
Before Help Me Edit After Help Me Edit
Okay, but what about a more challenging fence? Next, I tried this photo of a bear with a much bigger and more complicated fence covering its entire body. If you look to the right of the bear in the edited photo, you can see some distortion in the dirt where the fence originally was. You can also see some of this on the bear’s stomach. It’s not a perfect edit, but considering how much more challenging the scene is — and that the picture was taken in 2018 with an iPhone XS — I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.
Before Help Me Edit After Help Me Edit
Cranking things up one more time, I asked Help Me Edit to remove the fence from this picture of an owl. Between the size of the fence, the owl’s complicated feathers, and the countless leaves in the background, I didn’t have high hopes for this one.
Surprisingly, it’s even more impressive than the bear example. The edited picture has a very faint shadow from the fence in the owl’s feathers, but you really have to look to notice it. If you showed me the edited picture without any context, I don’t think I’d be able to tell what had been done to it.
Before Help Me Edit After Help Me Edit
Lastly, while fences are the big news here, I was curious if you could also use Help Me Edit to remove dirty glass from images. And as it turns out, you can! You can still see lines from the glass scratches/reflections to the left of the alligator, but the edited photo is cleaned up so much without any additional distortion or AI hallucinations. It may not be as visually impressive as the fence examples, but it’s another cool use case for this technology.
Gemini Nano Banana, the poor man’s alternative So what if you don’t have a Google Pixel 10 phone or, like me, you live outside the US, where Photos’ Help Me Edit isn’t currently available? For that, you need to turn to Gemini’s new photo editing feature, Nano Banana. It’s available in every country I checked, on personal, work, and paid Gemini versions, so everyone can dip their toes and ask Nano Banana to edit their photos. This includes fence removal, of course.
To do this, open Gemini and look for the fun “🍌 Image” icon at the bottom. Then, upload the image you want to edit (or you can share directly from Photos) and type your command. I tested this with plenty of zoo, farm, and reserve animal photos, and Banana delivered the goods. It even did a great job in complex setups where there was a front fence and a background one (macaw), very large fence bars (kudu), or similar fence-object colors (tree vs fence in the goat and eagles shots).
The main restriction, though, is that the resulting fenceless image will be limited by default to a 1184 × 864 resolution. Even when I asked Gemini to retain the original image size, it still compressed down. This isn’t the case with Help Me Edit, which keeps the full image resolution.
I also noticed that Gemini’s Nano Banana has a tendency to get creative with some images, cropping small parts of them, making minor adjustments to the background (pink flamingos), and sometimes even choosing to change the original photo. You can see this in the cute ocelot’s shut jaw and the, uh, interesting addition of a front paw on the wallaby that changes its innocent stance into something more… graphical. When I asked it to remove the front and back fence on the white owl shot, it also decided to change up the entire background.
Filling up text behind fences was a bit of a challenge, too. Nano Banana managed to guess about 50% of the correct words in the first sign below. Other photos required a few extra tries and arguments with Gemini to get the right edit. “You didn’t remove the entire fence on top,” for the pheasant image, and “You only removed one bar, remove all bars,” on the macaw shot got me a better final result.
I also attempted to use Nano Banana to remove glass reflections, haze, and glares, and the results were sometimes disappointing (crocodile, jellyfish), other times quite impressive (concert shots, Purple Rose Queen fish). Your mileage may vary, and you might have to really argue with Gemini and repeatedly ask it to fix something, which will cause extra artefacts with each edit.
Overall, I think Google Photos’ Help Me Edit is much better optimized for proper image edits, especially when you want to retain as much of the original shot’s detail and resolution while also removing obstructions and distractions. Gemini’s Nano Banana, even though it’s based on the same model, seems more of a freestyle artist that takes certain creative liberties and compresses your image in the process. It’s not bad per se — it’s even better than I ever could have imagined — and it’s giving some of my photos a new lease on life. But I’ll still patiently wait for Google Photos’ Help Me Edit to land outside the US to properly give my photos a run through.
Image credit: The top photo has been edited with the addition of Arrow PNGs by Vecteezy.
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