Restore Old Photo — Repair and Colorize Faded Family Pictures

Scan or photograph the print flat in even light and upload it. The photo is read first: a black-and-white or single-tone print is colorized, and a photo that already has color is repaired instead, with noise reduced, detail sharpened and light rebalanced. You can switch the treatment yourself and adjust how far it goes before downloading.

No. The original colors were never recorded, so a colorized result is a plausible version rather than a record of what was actually there. It is well suited to seeing a family photo in color, and it should not be treated as historical evidence of the colors of clothing, vehicles or surroundings.

Restoration reduces grain, dust speckle and softness, and rebalances faded light and color. Deep scratches, tears and missing corners are physical damage to the print and are not reliably rebuilt, so review the result and treat heavy damage as a separate retouching job.

The photo is measured for how much color it carries and how tightly its hues cluster. A black-and-white scan has almost no color, and a sepia or cyanotype print has color but only one tone, so both are set to add color. A photo with a real spread of colors is set to repair instead, so tones that were already correct are not repainted. The Restore tab shows what was chosen and lets you change it.

Lay the print flat and light it evenly, with no glare or reflection across the surface, and fill the frame with the print rather than the album page around it. A larger, sharper scan gives the restoration more to work with; a phone photo taken at an angle in a dim room gives it the least.

No. The file you upload is never altered — the restoration is produced as a separate image that you review and download, so the scan you started from stays exactly as it was.

Yes — Pixoate supports batch and bulk processing. Switch to Batch mode, add up to 60 photos on Premium or 200 on Pro, set your options once, and every photo is processed with the same settings before you download a single ZIP. Bulk processing is a Premium feature; the output uses the same quality and settings as single mode.

Yes — with bulk processing you configure the settings a single time and they apply to every item in the batch — up to 60 photos on Premium or 200 on Pro. There is no need to repeat the setup per item, and Temporary uploaded and generated files are processed securely and deleted automatically.

Almost always one of three things. The file is over the 20 MB free upload limit — Premium takes 50 MB and Pro 120 MB. The format is not one this tool accepts, so check the list shown on the upload panel. Or the file is not really the format its name says: renaming a file does not change what is inside it, and that is the reason a valid-looking image gets refused.

Start from the highest-resolution original you have. A screenshot of a photo, or a copy that has already been compressed and re-shared, gives the tool far less to work with and no setting recovers that. Then, where there is a strength control, come down from the default — most photos need less than the preview suggests. Compare against your original at full size before you download.

Restore Old Photo supports free standard use within the published processing allowances. Free downloads are clean — no watermark. No signup is required for standard tool use. Photo effects and AI edits have a web-size limit on Free, with the original-resolution result available through Premium or one credit. Crop, resize, rotate, compress and convert stay full size. Premium supports batches of up to 60 files, with the applicable plan limits shown before processing.

No — Restore Old Photo runs in the browser on desktop and phone. There is nothing to install, no trial to start, and no license to buy before you can see whether it does what you need. Try it on the file you are actually stuck with rather than a sample.