Optimizing prompts for spatial reasoning in Nano Banana 2 starts with being explicit about the layout you want rather than leaving spatial relationships implicit. Instead of writing "a person standing near a tree," write "a person standing to the left of a tree, with the tree occupying the right third of the image." Positional language that references cardinal directions, image regions (top-left, bottom-center), and relative sizes (filling one-quarter of the frame) gives the model more precise anchors for placing elements than qualitative terms like "near" or "in the background." The model responds better to concrete spatial descriptors than to compositional concepts that require inference.
Breaking complex spatial arrangements into a sequence of placement instructions also improves results. Rather than describing a scene with many elements in a single dense sentence, structure the prompt so that the most important element is described first with its position, followed by secondary elements described in relation to the first. For example: "A white building in the center of the frame. A narrow road leading toward the building from the bottom-left corner. Three trees in a row along the right edge of the road." This ordering gives the model a spatial anchor—the building—and then adds elements in relation to that anchor, which is closer to how a layout artist would think about composing the scene.
For prompts that require precise multi-element spatial arrangements and are consistently producing incorrect layouts, a useful debugging approach is to generate at lower complexity first—fewer elements, simpler relationships—and add complexity incrementally while testing each addition. This reveals which spatial constraint is causing the model to fail rather than attributing all failures to prompt quality. When spatial precision is critical and the model is not meeting the requirement, generating the compositional framework (background, major structural elements, spatial zones) as a first pass and then using the inpainting or multi-turn editing API to place specific elements into defined regions is a more reliable method than trying to specify the entire scene in a single prompt.