Restore Old Photos — Free, Private, In Your Browser

Restore an old photo in three steps: denoise the scan to clear grain and damage, colorize it if it is black and white, then upscale it for printing. Every step is free, unlimited and runs inside your browser — the photo never leaves your device. It is an irreplaceable original, so don't upload it anywhere.

Denoise the scan

Scanned prints carry film grain, paper texture, dust speckle and scanner sensor noise. The AI denoiser separates that noise from real detail so the picture underneath comes back clean, without smearing faces or edges.

Open AI Denoiser → 2

Colorize black & white

A neural network trained on millions of colour photographs predicts plausible skin tones, clothing, foliage and sky for your grayscale image. Works on portraits, group shots, street scenes and landscapes alike.

Open AI Colorizer → 3

Upscale for printing

Super-resolution enlarges the restored image 2× or 4× with real reconstructed detail rather than blur. Aim for 300 DPI at your target print size — an 8×10 inch print needs roughly 2400×3000 pixels.

Open AI Upscaler →

The order matters. Denoise before you upscale: an upscaler treats grain and dust as detail and magnifies them into hard, permanent artefacts, so anything you leave behind gets four times bigger. Colorize before you upscale too — the colour model works on a much smaller image, so it finishes far faster and uses far less memory, and the upscaler then sharpens the already-coloured result. Upscaling last is also why the final file stays crisp: every earlier step operated on clean, modest-sized pixels.

Why not use a subscription service?

Most well-known photo restoration services — genealogy platforms such as MyHeritage and similar restoration sites — sit behind an annual subscription that commonly starts around $119 or more per year, and their free tiers typically limit how many photos you can process and stamp a watermark across the preview until you pay. That's a perfectly legitimate business model, and those products bundle genuinely useful extras like family-tree matching and record search.

The trade-off is simply different here. This workflow is free, unlimited and unwatermarked, and there is nothing to sign up for. More importantly, a subscription restoration service has to receive your photograph on its servers to process it. Our tools don't: the models run in your browser via WebAssembly and WebGL, so the scan of your grandmother's wedding photo stays on your hard drive. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and nothing is retained for training.

If you're restoring a whole shoebox of prints, that difference compounds. There's no per-photo credit, no daily cap and no queue — the only limit is how fast your own machine can work.

Scanning tips for the best restoration

Restoration quality is decided before any AI runs. What you feed the tools is what they have to work with:

Scan at 600 DPI. 300 DPI is fine for a straight reprint at the same size, but 600 DPI captures enough grain-level information for the denoiser to distinguish noise from detail, and gives the upscaler more to build on. Go to 1200 DPI only for small originals such as wallet photos or 35mm contact prints.
Scan as TIFF or maximum-quality JPEG. Heavy JPEG compression bakes in blocking artefacts that the denoiser will try to preserve as real texture.
Straighten it. Prints rarely sit square on the glass, and photos of photos are worse. Fix the keystone and rotation with the perspective straightener before restoring.
Crop the border away. Scanner lids, album pages and white print margins confuse colorization models. Trim to the image itself with the image cropper.
Then run the three steps above — denoise, colorize, upscale — in that order.

One last step before you share the result: scans and phone photos can carry embedded metadata, including the scanner or camera model, timestamps and sometimes GPS coordinates from where the photo of the photo was taken. Check and strip it with the metadata viewer and remover before you post a restored family photo publicly or send it on to relatives.

What you get at each stage

Nothing uploads

Denoising, colorization and upscaling all execute locally. No server ever receives your photograph, so there is no copy to leak, retain or train on.

No caps, no watermarks

Process one photo or four hundred. There is no daily quota, no credit system and no watermark on the download.

Print-ready output

Upscale until you clear 300 DPI at your intended print size, then send the file straight to a lab or your own photo printer.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can I restore old photos for free?

Scan the print at 600 DPI, then run it through three free browser tools in order: the AI denoiser to clean grain and dust, the AI colorizer to add colour to a black and white image, and the AI upscaler to enlarge it for printing. There is no account, no subscription and no watermark on the result.

Is it safe to upload old family photos to restoration sites?

An old family photo is usually an irreplaceable original, so the safest option is not to upload it at all. With this workflow nothing uploads — every step runs inside your browser using WebAssembly and on-device models, so the file never leaves your computer and no copy is stored on a server.

What order should I restore a photo in?

Denoise first, colorize second, upscale last. Denoising before upscaling stops the upscaler from magnifying grain and dust into hard artefacts, and colorizing before upscaling means the colour model works on the smaller image, which is much faster and leaves the final enlargement crisp.