Gemini 2.5 Flash Image Preview: prepare for the retirement date

The notice

On December 4, 2025, Google announced that gemini-2.5-flash-image-preview would shut down on January 15, 2026.

Find every place that selects a model

The obvious application setting is only the beginning. Look in background jobs, campaign templates, notebooks, saved playground presets, and onboarding examples. A rarely used script can fail long after the main application has migrated.

Create an inventory with an owner for each integration. Record its workload, exact identifier, replacement candidate, and acceptance checks. A short shared list is more useful than a general message asking everyone to update.

Test the replacement as a release

Run representative requests against a currently supported model. Check both generation and editing if your application supports both. Inspect the parser and saved files as well as the visual result.

Deploy before the shutdown window, then verify that new requests no longer select the retired identifier. Keep the prior application release available for diagnosis, but do not treat a retired model as a working rollback option.

Use this as a reusable migration pattern

This deadline is now historical. The same inventory method applies to later deprecations: find dependencies, test an available target, update configuration, and confirm actual traffic has moved.