The still image is incredibly powerful; photographers know this better than anyone. And even in AI, it is the picture side of the product that is turbo-charging their gigantic businesses, according to a new report. Per Android Authority , the fastest growth for apps like ChatGPT and Google Gemini comes when there is an AI image trend, like the Studio Ghibli one last year. App intelligence provider Appfigures provided the data, essentially finding that image model releases correlate with large increases in downloads far more than upgrades to the chatbots. Google Gemini has benefited from Nano Banana, which gained the AI app an extra 22 million downloads when the viral AI image generator was released . That was four times the usual rate of Gemini downloads. It was a similar story for when OpenAI announced ChatGPT-4o , which was a big step forward in terms of the realism that AI imagery can achieve.…