What this is, and what it is not
RestoreYourPhoto is an independent, browser-based AI tool that repairs, colorizes, sharpens and animates old photographs. It runs on commercial image models, costs $0.44 to $0.70 a photograph with no subscription, and takes about thirty seconds.
- ~30 sec
- from upload to a finished photograph
- 1080p
- download, no watermark, at every pack size
- 30 days
- of history, then results are deleted
- $0.44
- a photo at the Max pack
Why it exists
Almost every family has the same box. Prints that faded, scans that came out soft, one good photograph of a grandparent with a crease straight through the face. A professional retoucher does beautiful work on these, and charges $50 to $150 a photograph for two to four hours of skilled manual work, which is a fair price and puts a whole album out of reach.
AI image models changed that arithmetic rather than that craft. The box of forty ordinary photographs now costs less than one professional restoration, and the two or three that genuinely matter can still go to a person. Most people who use this end up doing exactly that, and we think it is the right answer. The five places that restore old photos are set out separately, including the four that are not us.
Genealogists, archivists, local history groups, funeral directors assembling a memorial slideshow, and a great many people clearing a parent's house use it. The common thread is never the technology. It is somebody holding a photograph that cannot be taken again.
The four things it does
One credit a photograph, 3 for an animation, and the credit comes off when a photograph finishes rather than when it is uploaded, so a job that fails costs nothing.
Restore
Scratches, creases, tears, water staining and fading. One pass also brings colour back to a damaged black and white print, which beats colorizing a scratched photo and repairing it afterwards.
How to restore old photosColorize
Black and white to colour. Skin, sky, foliage, wood and documented period uniforms come out reliably. A specific dress or a painted door is a guess.
Colorizing black and white photographsSharpen
Camera shake, soft focus and the mush a low-resolution scan leaves behind. It recovers detail that is faintly present; it does not invent a face that was never in focus.
How to unblur a photoAnimate
A still portrait becomes a short clip: a turn of the head, a blink, a smile. Costs 3 credits rather than one, because it is a video model doing the work.
Animating old photosWhat it gets wrong
This section matters more than the feature list, and it is the part most pages in this category leave out. AI restoration is reconstruction, not recovery: the model infers what a damaged area most plausibly looked like and cannot know what was actually there. For ordinary damage the results are remarkable. Six places where they are not:
- Invention, not recovery
- Damaged areas are filled from the pixels around them. Where nothing surrounds the damage, a missing corner holding a face for instance, the model invents a plausible replacement. It looks exactly as convincing as a real recovery, which is the part worth knowing.
- Colour that was never recorded
- Skin, sky, foliage, wood, brick and documented period uniforms are predicted reliably. A specific dress, a painted door, a car, or eye colour on a print that lost it are invented. Plausible is not the same as correct.
- Text and numbers
- Sharpened text is frequently not the text that was there. Never rely on it for documents, dates, house numbers, licence plates or names written on the back.
- Resolution
- Output is capped at 1080p. Tools built for printing large export considerably bigger on paid plans, and if you are enlarging for a frame that is a real difference.
- Privacy of the file itself
- Photographs are uploaded to a server to be processed. That is the trade every browser-based tool asks for. Anything that must never leave your own machine needs desktop software instead.
- No video restoration, no scanning
- We repair images. Getting paper onto a screen is a separate job, and a dedicated scanning app does it better than we would.
We would rather say this plainly than let a gallery of best results imply otherwise. If you want to see where the whole category struggles rather than only where we do, the comparison of restoration apps runs the same photographs through each one.
What happens to your photos
The photographs people upload here are among the most personal files they own. They are uploaded to be processed, kept in your history for 30 days so a second download never costs a second credit, and then deleted. You can delete a single result, or the whole account, at any time. Your original file is never altered or overwritten.
We do not sell or share user data and we do not train models on your photographs. Sign-in is with Google, so there is no password here to leak. The full detail is in the privacy policy and the data processing agreement, and GDPR requests go through the contact form, answered within 24 hours.
How the money works
One way only: one-time credit packs, from $6.99 for 10 restorations down to $0.44 a photograph at the largest. Credits never expire, there is no subscription to cancel, and there are no ads. Every purchase carries a 30-day money-back guarantee that we honour. The five packs are here.
The one other way money moves: people who write about the tool can earn a commission through our affiliate program, which pays 30% of a sale with a 180-day cookie. If you arrived through somebody's review, they were probably paid for it, and you paid exactly the same price either way. We would rather you knew that than worked it out.
Everything we have written
Each of these answers one question properly rather than advertising at you, including the ones where the answer is that you want somebody else.
- How to restore old photos
The whole workflow, from scanning a print with a phone to the finished file.
- Colorize black and white photos
What colorizing gets right, what it guesses, and how to judge a result.
- How to unblur a photo
Which kinds of blur are recoverable and which are gone for good.
- Animate old photos
Turning a still portrait into a short clip, and when it reads as uncanny.
- Water damaged photos
Drying and separating prints first, which is conservation rather than restoration.
- Free photo restoration
Where free actually ends across the tools that advertise it, ours included.
- Where to restore old photos
Drugstore counters, professionals, mail-in services and doing it yourself.
- Best photo restoration apps
The field compared on the same photographs, with prices read off each vendor.
- Best AI photo colorizers
Colorizing specifically, where the tools diverge most.
- Remini alternatives
What Remini costs, what it does well, and where it is the wrong tool.
- Photomyne cost and alternatives
A scanning app first and a restorer second, which decides who it suits.
- Restore a photo
The app itself. Drag a file in, pick what is wrong with it, download the result.
- Animate a photo
The animation styles, at 3 credits a clip.
- Pricing
Five one-time packs from $6.99. Nothing renews and nothing expires.
- Affiliate program
Earn 30% of every sale with a 180-day cookie. Invite only, applications open.
- Developer resources
The HTTP API, an OpenAPI 3.1 schema, and the context files we publish for AI assistants.
- Contact
A form that reaches a person, answered within 24 hours.
Questions people ask
Is RestoreYourPhoto free?
There is no free tier at present. Credits are one-time packs from $6.99 for 10 photographs, nothing renews, and every purchase carries a 30-day money-back guarantee, so judging the quality costs you nothing if it disappoints.
Is there a subscription?
No. Credits are bought once, they do not expire, and there is no renewal to cancel. It is the single most common question we get, because most of this category is subscription-based and several of them are hard to cancel.
What happens to the photos I upload?
They are uploaded to be processed, held in your history for 30 days so a second download never costs a second credit, and then deleted. You can delete any single result, or your whole account, at any time. Your original file is never altered or overwritten. We do not sell or share user data, and we do not train models on your photographs.
What AI does it use?
Commercial image and video models, currently built on Google’s Gemini family, prompted and tuned for the specific damage old photographs carry rather than for general image editing. We swap models when a better one ships, which is why this page names a family rather than a version number.
Is AI photo restoration accurate?
It is plausible rather than accurate, and the difference matters. The model reconstructs what a damaged area most likely looked like from its surroundings; where nothing surrounds the damage, it invents. For ordinary fading, scratches and creases the result is usually indistinguishable from a careful hand repair. For a face half missing, treat the output as an illustration rather than a record.
Who is behind it?
A small independent team rather than a company with a partnerships department. There are no investors, no ads and no data sales: the only money that comes in is credit packs and the only money that goes out is compute. Mail reaches the people who build it and is answered within 24 hours.
