Restore Old Photos With AI: Scan, Repair and Colorize Online

To restore old photos with AI, you upload a scan or a phone photo of the print, and the tool returns a sharper, repaired or colorized copy while the original stays in the album. Toybox AI splits that work across three tools: Smart Editor for creases and tears you describe in words, Image Unblur for soft focus, and Image Colorizer for black and white or faded color. How good the result looks depends first on the copy you start from.

What you can make with AI photo restoration

Old photo restoration AI covers four separate fixes, and most family prints need two or three of them.

• Faded color prints brought back. A snapshot from the 1970s or 1980s that has turned orange or washed out is the classic case. The Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) says most color photographs fade fairly fast, while today's fiber-based black and white prints barely fade in light. Image Colorizer accepts faded color prints as well as black and white ones.
• Black and white portraits in color. A 1940s studio portrait or a wedding photo gets believable skin, hair and clothing colors. Those colors are an informed guess, which the guide to colorizing black and white photos explains, along with a method that uses no AI at all.
• Soft snapshots made sharper. Small faces in a group shot, or a print that was slightly out of focus, can come back clearer in Image Unblur. What it adds is plausible new detail drawn by the AI, not the detail the camera missed.
• Creases, tears and stains repaired. On a Pro plan, Smart Editor takes an instruction such as "repair the crease across the top left corner, keep both faces the same" and redraws the photo with the fix. Results vary with the damage. The photo restoration prompts have wording for each kind of damage.
• Copies for the family. Each result downloads as a PNG you can send to a group chat, drop into a memorial slideshow or attach to a genealogy profile, while the print goes back in the album.
• A short moving clip. Video Creator, powered by Google Veo 3.1 and included with Pro plans, can start from your restored photo and add gentle motion. Turning the result into a clip is its own job, covered on the page about how to animate old family photos.

Scan the photo before you restore it

The scan decides how much real detail the AI has to work with, so make it before you touch any tool. A flatbed scanner gives the most even copy. For photographic prints, the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI), which writes digitizing guidelines for US agencies, puts its 3-star level at about 400 ppi and its top 4-star level at 600 ppi.

The math is inches x ppi = pixels. A 4 x 6 inch print scanned at 600 ppi becomes 2400 x 3600 px, and a 3.5 x 5 inch print becomes 2100 x 3000 px. That is enough to zoom in on an eye or a torn edge while you check a repair.

• Scan in color, even a black and white print. FADGI's guidelines call for 16-bit color masters of black and white prints too, from the 3-star level up, so pick the color setting on your scanner for every print.
• Hold prints by the edges. The Library of Congress recommends clean hands or clean nitrile gloves, and keeping fingers off the image area.
• Blow dust off instead of wiping it. The Library of Congress warns that even soft brushes can scratch a photograph, and suggests an air bulb rather than canned air.
• Clean the scanner glass. FADGI points out that dust on a flatbed's glass ends up in the file, where it looks like damage.
• Leave curled prints curled. FADGI says tightly curled photographs must not be forced flat. Photograph a curled print on a table instead.
• Use your phone if there's no scanner. PhotoScan by Google Photos costs nothing, runs on iOS 15 or later, and has you capture the print in a few quick steps so it can take out glare, then crops it by its edges and corrects the perspective.
• Keep the untouched scan. FADGI doesn't allow color, tone or restoration changes on a master image. Save the raw scan, and restore a copy.
• Save it as JPG or PNG. Toybox accepts JPG or PNG uploads up to 10 MB, not HEIC. On an iPhone, Settings, then Camera, then Formats, then Most Compatible makes new photos save as JPEG.

How to restore old photos for free

Free phone apps handle the two most common problems, faded color and small spots, and two free AI routes go further: Google's Unblur for a print that is only soft, and Adobe Firefly for damage you describe in a sentence.

Google opened Photo Unblur and Magic Eraser to every Google Photos user in a rollout that began May 15, 2024, with no subscription required. Snapseed's App Store listing says the app has no ads, watermarks, subscriptions or in-app purchases, and its Healing tool removes a spot when you brush or tap it. MyHeritage lets every user repair several photos free, and repairing more needs its Complete subscription.

Adobe Firefly is a free old photo restoration AI option that follows typed instructions. You upload the scan, type what to fix, and download the result as a JPEG or PNG. Adobe gives free accounts a daily allowance of generations, accepts uploads up to 40 MB, and caps downloads at 2000 x 2000 px. The guide to fixing faded, torn and scratched prints has the step-by-step instructions for the phone apps.

Tips for better restoration results

• Repair first, color last. Image Colorizer doesn't fix damage, so a crease you haven't repaired gets tinted along with everything else. MyHeritage says the same about its own tools: repair is the step that should always come first.
• Describe damage by where it is. "The white crease from the top left corner down to the man's shoulder" names one line. "Fix the damage" leaves the AI to decide what counts.
• List what must not change. OpenAI's prompting guide for its image models recommends pairing "change only X" with "keep everything else the same" and repeating the keep list each round. For family photos, that list is faces, expressions, hair and clothing.
• Put remembered colors in Notes. If an aunt remembers a green dress or red hair, write it in the Notes box, which takes up to 500 characters in Image Colorizer.
• Ask for the grain to stay. A 1950s print with perfectly smooth skin looks painted. Add "keep the film grain" to your note or instruction, then check that the skin and sky still have texture.
• Check at full size. Zoom into eyes, teeth, hands and any lettering on signs or uniforms, where rebuilt detail shows first.

These two notes are written for the Notes box in Image Colorizer, one for a black and white portrait and one for a faded color print:

1950s wedding portrait. Ivory satin dress, dark gray suit with a white carnation, warm natural skin tones, brown hair on both of them, pale green wallpaper behind. Keep the film grain and leave their faces as they are.

Faded backyard snapshot from the late 1970s with an orange cast. Bring back a blue sky, green grass and a yellow house, keep skin tones natural, and keep the gentle softness the print has now.

What AI photo restoration can't do

AI tools fix a lot, but four limits decide whether the result is good enough to keep.

• The colorizer won't repair damage. Image Colorizer only adds color. It keeps the photo's composition and people as they are, so scratches, tears, stains and missing corners stay put. Repair them first with Smart Editor (Pro plan) or a free healing brush such as Snapseed's, then colorize.
• Rebuilt detail isn't recovered detail. Image Unblur and other AI sharpeners fill in detail that looks right, so a small face can come back slightly different. MyHeritage says the same of its own Photo Enhancer: the result is a simulation that may be inaccurate. Hold the result next to the original, and show it to a relative who remembers that face.
• Colors are a guess. A black and white print holds no color information, so every colorizer picks colors that fit. MyHeritage says its own colorizer has no way of knowing the true colors of specific items of clothing. Write down any colors you're sure of, and label the copy as colorized.
• Missing pieces get invented. When a tear takes away part of a face, any AI replaces it with features that never existed. For an heirloom like that, compare the cost of a human restorer in photo restoration services vs AI.

How to restore old photos with AI in Toybox

1. Scan the print at 600 ppi, or photograph it flat in soft light, and save it as a JPG or PNG under 10 MB.
2. For creases or tears, open Smart Editor on a Pro plan, upload the scan under Your image, and type the fix in "What should change?", for example "Repair the crease across the top left corner and rebuild the torn edge with the same gray wall. Keep both faces exactly the same." Tap Apply edit.
3. If more damage remains, leave Latest result selected and type the next fix. Smart Editor redraws the entire photo on every edit, so look over the parts you didn't mention too. HD returns about 1,024 px on the short side, and Quality 4K under More options (currently 110 credits) goes up to about 8 megapixels. Download the repaired copy when the damage is gone, and save it as a JPG if the PNG is over 10 MB.
4. If the photo is soft, open Image Unblur, upload the repaired copy (or the scan itself on the Free plan) under Your photo, and tap Sharpen photo. Download the PNG.
5. Open Image Colorizer, upload the latest copy under Your photo, add known colors under More options in Notes, and tap Colorize photo.
6. Compare each result with your untouched scan at full size. Results you don't save are deleted after 24 hours, so download the PNG or save it to your gallery.

Image Unblur and Image Colorizer are on the Free plan and currently cost 75 credits each. A Smart Editor edit currently costs 85 credits in HD and needs a Pro plan, which currently starts at $9.99 a month for 1,000 credits. The 20 free credits a new account gets won't cover any image tool. At top-up prices a credit costs about a cent, so a colorized photo comes to about 75 cents (see current prices).