I opened gemini.google.com first thing one morning to make a single explanatory diagram for a client site I maintain. The Images entry in the left sidebar, the one I had used the night before, simply was not there.
I checked the product updates. I skimmed the help centre for anything new. About fifteen minutes in, I glanced at the top right of the browser window and felt rather foolish — I was in a different profile, signed in with a work account, looking for something I remembered from my personal one.
Image features in the Gemini app are not governed by a single switch. Two age thresholds apply, and in front of both of them sits the question of what kind of account you are signed in with. Once you know which line you are standing behind, you also know whether this is a fault at all, and who to ask next.
When a feature looks like it has vanished, I check who I am signed in as before I suspect the feature. That rule came out of a morning I spent going the long way round.
Creating and editing need different ages
This was the part that surprised me most when I went back to the help pages. Generating an image and editing one look like two sides of the same feature, but they carry separate age requirements.
- To generate images — you must be 13 or over, or the applicable age in your country
- To generate and edit images — you must be 18 or over
The help text puts the second one plainly: users under 18 cannot use image editing.
So you can end up in a state where creating works and only editing stops, and that is the product behaving as designed rather than failing. Because the first half works, anyone testing on a family account is likely to go looking somewhere else entirely for the cause.
Age is not taken from anything you type on screen. It comes from the date of birth stored on the Google Account. With Family Link, a parent can switch off access for users under 13, and accounts managed through Family Link cannot reach the Gemini web app at present. There is a layer here that no amount of poking at the user's own settings will move.
For work and school accounts, an administrator decided first
Three kinds of account can sign in:
- A personal Google Account
- A work Google Account on a qualifying Workspace edition, for users 18 and over
- A school Google Account, where the organisation's administrator has allowed the service
The image help adds that access restrictions may differ when you are signed in with a school account. Under-18 school accounts also cannot export generated images to Docs, which is a separate condition again.
My own stumble came before any of that. I was in the work profile without registering it, hunting for an entry point I remembered from elsewhere. As an indie developer I keep browser profiles separated on purpose, and I suspect anyone who does the same is a good candidate for the same mistake.
When the feature is missing on a work or school account, there is very little left for you to change. The decision belongs to the administrator. Recognising that early saves the entire round trip through the settings screens.
Line them up and the right contact becomes obvious
Here is each line, what it looks like on screen, and who can actually help.
| Where you are stuck | What you see | Where to check | Who to contact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Not signed in | Image generation is unavailable | The account indicator, top right | Nobody. Signing in resolves it |
| Account type | It appears on personal accounts but not on work or school ones | Your browser profile and the address you are signed in with | Your Google Workspace administrator |
| The age 13 line | Image generation is unavailable | Date of birth on the Google Account, Family Link settings | The parent who manages that account |
| The age 18 line | Generation works, only editing is blocked | As above | As above |
| Language and country | The feature is not offered in that version of the app | The supported languages and countries help page | Nobody. This one is a waiting game |
The last row is the only one where the answer never changes no matter who you ask. Availability is limited to the languages and countries a given version of the app supports. Deciding to wait is easier on you than continuing to look.
"Something went wrong" will not narrow it down
The sign-in help lists two different messages. One of them, telling you the service is unavailable to your account, comes with real detail about age and account type. The other, the generic "something went wrong", is described as having any number of causes — location, age, account type, and more.
Reading that second message closely will not get you anywhere. Working down the table above is faster in practice.
It is worth saying why the vaguer message exists at all. Google explains that it looks at signals across an account to confirm a real person is behind it, and that generic wording is what you get when several of those checks could be the reason. A precise explanation would also be a map for anyone trying to work around the checks. Knowing that, I stopped treating the message as a diagnosis and started treating it as a prompt to check the list myself.
Sometimes the entry point itself is the problem. On a computer, you open the sidebar at the top left and choose Images. Which Nano Banana model runs depends on your Gemini model setting: Flash-Lite gives you Nano Banana 2 Lite, Flash or Pro gives you Nano Banana 2, and on a paid plan you can regenerate through Nano Banana Pro afterwards. Assuming a setting lives in exactly one place is the same trap as deleting a chat and finding the context still there, which I wrote up in Deleting the Chat Was Not Enough — There Was a Second Place to Clear.
Write three lines before you contact anyone
If there is one thing worth doing today, it is writing these three lines down before you message an administrator or a family member.
- The email address you are currently signed in with
- What kind of account it is — personal, work, or school
- Whether it stopped at generation or at editing
Those three lines change the reply you get from "let me look into it" to "I'll change that setting for you". I tried it once with a client and have not needed a second round of messages since.
What I ask Gemini for is explanatory diagrams for articles and tidy-ups on store screenshots. The artwork itself I still make by hand, which is partly why losing a morning to one missing diagram stings the way it does.
There is a companion case where the same phrase covers different walls: files the app refuses to accept. I set that one out in Before You Split That PDF: Three Different Limits in the Gemini App.
Both of the sources behind this are official: Generate and edit images with Gemini Apps and What you need to sign in to Gemini Apps. These conditions shift without much noise, so those two pages are where I go back to when I am unsure.
Thank you for reading. If this gives someone their fifteen minutes back, it was worth writing down.