Looking for Upscayl online ? Here is what exists, and a browser tool built for faces.

Upscayl deserves a fair description because it is a good piece of software. The desktop app is free and open source under the AGPL, and it wraps the Real-ESRGAN family of upscaling models in a clean interface. Drop in an image, pick a model and a scale factor, and it enlarges the image on your own graphics card. Nothing is uploaded anywhere, there is no watermark, no account, and no daily limit, and the code is public.

For product photos, illustrations, screenshots, and clean photographs that simply need to be bigger, it is hard to beat. This page is not going to pretend otherwise.

A lot of people search for an online version of Upscayl because the desktop app will not run on their machine. There is one now. Upscayl Cloud runs in the browser, starts with a 10-credit free trial, and then charges a monthly subscription, roughly $9.99 a month for 100 credits or $24.99 a month for 300, with unused credits rolling over for up to three months. It adds things the free app lacks: face enhancement, batch processing, higher resolution ceilings, and no GPU requirement.

Two things are worth knowing before subscribing. First, it is still an upscaler with a face-enhancement pass on top, not a restorer; scratches, creases, stains, and faded colour are not what it is built to fix. Second, it is a subscription, so the credits and the access end when you stop paying. For someone upscaling hundreds of images a month it is well priced. For someone with one shoebox of prints it is a monthly bill for a weekend of work.

The free app's models are general-purpose super-resolution networks. They learn what sharp textures look like and hallucinate plausible detail when enlarging. That works beautifully on brickwork, foliage, and fabric. It works badly on faces, because a face is not a texture; it is a structure with specific parts in specific relationships, and small errors in an eye or a mouth are immediately visible in a way that small errors in a brick are not. Without a model that knows what a face is, the result is smooth, slightly plastic skin and features that are sharp but subtly wrong. Reviewers consistently note this as the free app's main weakness on portraits.

RestorePhotosApp's restore style is built around face recovery: it reconstructs the eyes, mouth, and skin texture from what is in the image, so a restored face looks like a clearer photo of the same person. Upscayl Cloud's face enhancement narrows this gap on clean portraits; on old prints the damage underneath is still the bigger problem.

An old print has problems that enlargement does not solve. Scratches, creases, water stains, dust, and a faded colour cast are all part of the image, and an upscaler treats them as detail to be preserved and sharpened. Run a creased 1965 print through Upscayl at 4x, on the desktop or in the cloud, and you get a large, sharp, creased print.

RestorePhotosApp's restore and cleanup styles remove that damage and reconstruct what was under it, correct the colour cast, and then recover the face, in one pass. If the original is black and white, the colorize style adds colour. None of that is what Upscayl does, and it is the reason the two tools are not really competing for the same photos.

A reader has a two-inch school portrait of her father from 1958, scanned at low resolution, with a scratch across the shoulder and a soft face. She installs Upscayl on her laptop, gets a GPU error, and tries the Upscayl Cloud trial instead. The result is large and sharp, and the face enhancement has helped a little. The scratch is large and sharp too, and the skin still has the smooth look that upscalers give it. To do the rest of the box she would need a monthly plan.

On RestorePhotosApp, from the same laptop, she uploads the scan and runs Restore. The scratch is gone, the face has the texture and detail of a real photograph, and the output is a clean 1080p file. She uses her second free credit on Colorize and gets a natural colour version. Total cost: nothing. When the rest of the school photos surface, the Starter pack at $6.99 covers them, once.

Had the reader been enlarging a scanned landscape or a product illustration, the free Upscayl app would have been the right call, and Upscayl Cloud the right call if she had hundreds a month. The tools are good at different things.

Upscayl is excellent software, free on the desktop and reasonably priced in the cloud for people who upscale in volume. For clean images that need to be bigger, it is the tool to use.

For old photos of people, it is the wrong tool, not because of the price but because upscaling is not restoration: no version of it removes damage, and only the paid version tries to help with faces. RestorePhotosApp does both, in the browser, for one-time credits that never expire. Test it with the two free restorations on the same portrait and compare the faces. For the wider field, see our best photo restoration apps guide and the comparison hub.