PhotoRestoration

What is PhotoRestoration?

PhotoRestoration is a browser-based AI service for working with old photographs. According to its About page, it is built by a small team of engineers and archivists with a single focus: restoring, colorizing, repairing and animating old family photographs, in roughly a minute, from a browser tab, with nothing to install. The project began, the page states, with a shoebox of fading prints that younger family members had never seen clearly.

The tool accepts scans, prints, negatives and phone snapshots of album pages. Its stated working method is conservation-first: the photograph is repaired rather than re-imagined, and the site repeatedly advises users to keep their original scan.

How PhotoRestoration works

The workflow has three steps.

1. Upload your old photo. Accepted formats are JPG, PNG, WEBP and HEIC, up to 20MB. Scans, prints and phone photos all work.
2. Pick a restoration mode. Four modes are available: Restore & Upscale, Colorize, Repair Damage and Animate. The site states that each mode runs a model tuned for that specific kind of damage.
3. Download the result. A reduced-resolution, watermarked preview is free. The full-resolution file is downloaded after credits are spent.

Processing is handled by "state-of-the-art generative image models accessed through our service," per the About page. Those models were trained on large photographic corpora, and the site says they rebuild damage from the surrounding real texture of the scan rather than painting over it. The About page is explicit about the distinction: where detail survives, the result is recovery; where detail is missing, the result is a plausible reconstruction.

Typical turnaround is about 60 seconds for a restore, and 2–5 minutes for a video render. A render finish setting — Standard, Professional or Master — controls how far the rendering goes, and every finish costs the same credits.

Main features

• Restore & Upscale — repairs damage and sharpens detail at up to 4× resolution.
• Colorize — adds colour described as natural and period-accurate to black-and-white photos.
• Repair Damage — removes scratches, tears, creases, stains and dust.
• Animate — turns a still portrait into a short video. The About page adds that the tool can reconstruct speech and singing from a single photo.
• Render finishes — Standard (conservation-grade), Professional (described as an 85mm f/1.4 studio-portrait look) and Master (described as G-Master rendering with editorial lighting and gallery-print fidelity).
• Batch upload and priority render queue — listed as features of the Family Pack tier.
• Credits that never expire, with failed renders refunded automatically.

Pricing

Pricing is one-time credit purchase with no subscription. The pricing page lists:

Tier	Price	What it includes
Free Preview	$0, one-time	One watermarked preview at reduced resolution
Single HD Photo	$4.90, one-time	One full-resolution restoration, no watermark
Starter	$14.90, one-time	Ten photo restorations
Most Popular	$24.90, one-time	Ten restorations plus three photo animations
Family Pack	$39.90, one-time	Twenty restorations plus eight photo animations, batch upload, priority render queue
Video Add-on	$9.90, one-time	Three photo animations, for existing pack customers

Credit costs are published as: one restoration = 100 credits; animate a photo via MiniMax H3 at 768p = 300 credits; animate via Seedance 2.5 = 500 credits; add an audio track = 200 credits. Failed renders are refunded automatically.

Common use cases

The site's example gallery covers 19th- and 20th-century portraits and family photographs — a sea captain from the 1850s, a railway worker from the 1870s, a First World War infantryman from 1916, a jazz-age couple from 1925, a Depression-era family from 1934 and a studio wedding from 1938. Practical uses implied by the feature set include digitising a family archive, recovering faded or stained prints, colourising monochrome originals, producing gallery-print-fidelity versions of portraits, and animating a still portrait.

Limitations

The site is candid about several constraints. Where detail is missing from the original, the output is a plausible reconstruction rather than a recovery — which is why every guide recommends keeping the original scan. Uploads are capped at 20MB. The free preview is watermarked and reduced resolution. Animation is substantially more expensive than restoration in credits (300–500 versus 100), and the audio add-on costs a further 200 credits; the $9.90 video add-on is restricted to customers who have already bought a pack.

On data handling, the pricing FAQ states that uploaded photos are stored so they can be re-downloaded, sent to a third-party AI model provider only to produce the result, never used to train models and never sold; users can delete any photo and its results from the dashboard. The pricing page does not specify output file formats or the pixel dimensions behind the 4× upscale figure.

Summary

PhotoRestoration is a pay-per-use, browser-based restoration tool covering repair, colourisation, upscaling and animation of old photographs. It competes on transparent, non-expiring credit pricing and a free preview that lets users judge quality before paying, while disclosing plainly where AI output is reconstruction rather than recovery.