Restore Old Photos — Free, Private, In Your Browser
Restore an old photo in three steps: denoise the scan to smooth out grain, 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 denoiser smooths that grain away, then re-sharpens only the real edges, with two sliders so you can balance a clean result against fine detail.
Open AI Denoiser → 2Colorize black & white
Gives a greyscale scan a warm, hand-tinted vintage look: cool shadows, warm midtones and soft highlights. It is a fast tone effect rather than a neural network, so it sets a period mood instead of guessing the real colour of each object.
Open AI Colorizer → 3Upscale for printing
An on-device super-resolution model doubles the restored image's width and height in each pass (run it twice for 4×), reconstructing detail rather than just smoothing. 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 tint is quicker on a smaller image, and the upscaler then enlarges the already-coloured result. Upscaling last keeps the final file crisp: every earlier step operated on clean, modest-sized pixels.
How to use it
Scanning tips for the best restoration
Restoration quality is decided before any tool 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 add tones that are not part of the photo. 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.
About this tool
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: every step runs in your browser (the upscaler's model on 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.
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.
Common questions
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 smooth grain, the AI colorizer to give a black and white image a warm vintage tint, 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 (the upscaler with an on-device model), 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.