Free photo restoration

What is actually free

The two most upvoted threads on this subject both ask for a truly free tool, which tells you what people keep running into. So before anything else, here is the table, and we have put ourselves in it on the same terms as everyone else.

Read off each tool's own pages on 3 November 2026. We sell one of these and it is the one at the bottom with no free tier at all, which you should weigh accordingly.

The four ways free is paid for

Every tool advertised as free uses one of these. None of them is dishonest in itself; the problem is only ever finding out which one you are in after you have done the work.

A watermark on the download

The preview is clean and the file you download is stamped. This is the most common one and the most annoying, because you only find out after you have done the work. Palette.fm puts a Palette logo in the corner of its free output and says so on its own page, which is more honest than most.

A resolution cap

The result looks right on screen and the download is a few hundred pixels wide. Palette.fm resizes free output to a maximum of 500x500. A 500-pixel image cannot be printed and cannot be enlarged, so for a photograph you actually care about it is a preview rather than a result.

Ads and a daily limit

Remini works this way: free with ads at roughly five photos a day. This is the most honest of the four, because nothing is withheld from the file you get. It is simply slow, and a box of two hundred prints becomes a six-week project.

A card for a trial that renews

The one that actually costs people money. You enter a card for a trial measured in days, forget, and are charged for a year. If a tool asks for a card before showing you a result, that is the model you are in, whatever the page calls it.

There is a fifth that is not really a model: tools that are free because they are not very good. Those are easy to spot in a minute and not worth a section.

Why nobody can give it away

It is worth understanding the arithmetic, because it explains every limit on this page and it is not a conspiracy. Restoring a photograph runs a large model on a GPU, and GPU time is billed by the second. A restoration costs the provider real money each and every time somebody presses the button, whether or not that person ever pays.

So a tool advertising unlimited free restoration has to recover that cost somewhere, and there are only so many places. It can stamp the download and sell you the clean one. It can cap the resolution and sell you the full one. It can run ads. It can take a card for a trial and rely on you forgetting. Or, the one people notice least, it can quietly run a cheaper model: an older, smaller or more heavily compressed one that costs a fraction as much per image and produces visibly worse faces. That is why a free result often looks soft, plasticky or subtly wrong in a way that is hard to name.

The combination that catches people most often is a tool that is advertised as free, asks for a card anyway “to verify”, and then returns a watermarked 500-pixel file from a weaker model. Nothing there is illegal and all of it is avoidable by doing the one-minute test before you invest an evening.

Where that leaves us

We charge for it, and this is the page where that has to be justified rather than glossed over. A credit is between $0.44 and $0.70 and it buys a full run of the same model every time, not a reduced one. Nothing is stamped on the download, nothing is downscaled, and there is no cheaper tier producing worse results. The file is identical whether you bought the smallest pack or the largest.

What you also get for it: no subscription and no renewal date, credits that do not expire, a 30-day history so a second download never costs a second credit, and a 30-day money-back guarantee if the output is not what you expected. You can upload a photograph and see the result before deciding whether any of that is worth under a dollar.

That is the honest trade and it is not right for everybody. If you have one ordinary soft phone photo, the free options below will do it and you should use them. If you have a box of damaged prints, paying a few dollars for unmarked full-resolution files from a model that was not cut down to be free is the cheaper outcome, measured in evenings as well as money.

The genuinely free options

Three, and all three make us no money. Each covers one part of the problem rather than all of it, which is the real catch, and it is a better catch than a watermark.

Google Photos Unblur, for softness

Free for every Google Photos user on Android and iOS since 15 May 2024, with no Google One subscription and no Pixel phone required. The ten-saves-a-month cap often quoted alongside it applies to Magic Editor, not to Unblur. Open the photo, tap Edit, then Tools, then Unblur. If your problem is an ordinary soft phone photo, this is the end of the job. More on the limits of sharpening in how to unblur a photo.

DeOldify, for colour

Open source, free forever, nothing stamped on the output and nothing uploaded to anybody. It colorizes black and white photographs and does nothing else. The price is that you run it yourself in Python or a Colab notebook, which rules it out for most people and makes it the best answer going for the few it does not.

GIMP, for everything, by hand

Free, open source, and capable of better results than any automated tool on a photograph that matters, because you are making every decision. Two to four hours per photograph is normal. For one irreplaceable print that is time well spent; for forty it is a month of evenings.

What none of the three does is repair physical damage well. Scratches, tears, creases and water staining are the gap in the free options, and it is not an accident: that is the hardest of the jobs and the one nobody gives away.

Free tiers with limits

The freemium tier of a paid tool is often the best free option available, as long as you know the limit before you start rather than after.

Remini: ads, roughly five a day

Nothing is withheld from the file, which makes this the most honest free tier in the group. It is strongest on faces and weaker on the rest of the frame. Five a day is fine for a dozen portraits and hopeless for a shoebox.

Palette.fm: 500x500 and a logo

Their own page states that the free plan resizes larger images to a maximum of 500x500 pixels and places a Palette logo in the corner. Treat the free output as a preview of what the paid version would do, which is genuinely useful for deciding whether to pay.

VanceAI: ten credits

Ten credits to try, then a subscription. Enough to test the quality on your own photographs, which is all a trial needs to be.

The one-minute test

This is the whole article in one paragraph, and it works on any tool you ever try, including ours.

1. Restore one photo, not twenty.
2. Download the actual file. Do not judge it from the preview.
3. Open it at full size, 100 percent zoom, and look at the corners and a face.
4. Check the pixel dimensions against your original. If they dropped, that is the resolution cap.

That answers the watermark question and the resolution question at once, and it costs you a minute instead of an evening. If a tool wants a card before it will show you step two, you already know which of the four models you are in.

When paying is the cheaper answer

Free stops being free when it costs you time. Five photos a day with ads is six weeks for a shoebox. Two hours in GIMP per photograph is a month of evenings for forty. At some quantity the arithmetic turns over, and for most people it turns over somewhere around thirty photographs.

We should be straight about our own position on a page like this: there is no free tier here at the moment. We sell one-time credit packs, nothing renews, and the credits do not expire. If you want exactly one photograph done, one of the free options above is a better fit than we are. One credit restores one photo, and a credit is between $0.44 and $0.70 depending on the pack.

The comparison that matters is not free against paid, it is against what the alternative actually costs. A professional charges $50 to $150 a photograph. Your own time in GIMP is two to four hours each. Against those, a per-photo price under a dollar is the cheap option, and against Google Photos Unblur on a slightly soft phone photo it is not. Pick by what is wrong with the photograph, which is laid out in how to restore old photos.

Questions people ask