Restore vintage photos with AI beautifully.

Any photograph roughly 30 years old or older qualifies as vintage. This includes daguerreotypes, tintypes, cabinet cards, and albumen prints from the 1800s, gelatin silver prints from the early-to-mid 1900s, and early color and Polaroid prints from the 1960s-80s. Our AI handles all of these formats.

Yes. The AI is trained on photographs from every era of photography, including daguerreotypes, tintypes, and albumen prints from the 1800s. These very old photos often have heavy tarnishing, foxing, and fading, and the AI recovers remarkable detail from them, frequently revealing faces clearly for the first time in over a century.

Your first 2 restorations are free. After that, credits start at $4.99 for 10 restorations. The Family plan at $19.99 for 150 restorations ($0.13 each) is ideal for processing an entire vintage collection. Compare this to $75-$300 per photo at a professional restoration studio.

No. The AI preserves the authentic look and feel of the era. Sepia tones in genuine sepia prints are maintained. Period-appropriate contrast levels are respected. The restoration removes damage — scratches, fading, stains — while keeping the historical character intact. You get a clean version of the original, not a modernized reinterpretation.

Yes. After restoring a black-and-white or sepia vintage photo, upload the restored version and select "Colorize B&W" mode. The AI adds historically plausible colors based on the era, clothing styles, and context. Many families keep both the restored monochrome and the colorized version.

Handle it with cotton gloves, touching only the edges. Place it face-down on a flatbed scanner and scan at 600-1200 DPI in full color. Lower the lid gently without pressing. If the photo is stuck to glass in a frame, scan through the glass rather than risk removing it. For extremely fragile items, a local archivist or library may offer scanning services.

Yes. While a flatbed scan gives the best results, a phone photo works well if you follow a few guidelines. Shoot in bright, even daylight near a window. Hold the phone flat, directly above the print. Avoid shadows across the photo and glare from the print surface. The AI compensates for the slight quality difference between a phone capture and a true scan.

The AI can reconstruct small to medium missing areas with plausible detail based on surrounding context. For large missing sections, especially those containing unique details like a face, the AI generates a plausible fill but cannot recover the specific original content. For critically important photos with major damage, a combination of AI restoration and professional manual retouching produces the best result.

Store the physical originals in acid-free archival sleeves in a cool, dry, dark location. Save the digital restored files in at least two locations — a cloud service and a local hard drive. The digital version is now your sharing and printing copy, while the physical original is preserved as the historical artifact.

Yes. Upload multiple vintage photos and the AI processes each one individually with era-appropriate corrections. The Family plan at $0.13 per photo makes it practical to restore entire albums and collections. For a typical shoebox of 50-100 vintage prints, the total cost is under $15.

For typical vintage photo damage — fading, yellowing, scratches, minor tears, foxing, and water stains — AI restoration produces results comparable to professional manual work. Professional restorers may still be preferable for extreme cases involving large missing sections or severely cracked emulsion. But for the vast majority of vintage family photos, AI delivers excellent results at a fraction of the cost and turnaround time.

Yes. After restoring a vintage portrait, use the Animate feature to create a short video where the person appears to move — a gentle blink, a slight smile, or a slow camera push-in. Each animation costs 3 credits and produces a deeply moving tribute, especially for photos of ancestors you never met.