Best AI to restore old photos (without turning grandma into a stranger)

Every one of these tools is guessing

When an old photo is blurry, the detail isn’t hiding in there waiting to be found. The AI looks at millions of other faces and paints in what it thinks belongs. MyHeritage says so in its own help page: the enhancement “is a simulation” and its results “may be inaccurate and, in rare cases, even distorted.”

People who do this a lot have noticed. In a September 2026 r/aiArt thread about restoring a grandfather’s photos, the poster changed his wording from “restoration” to “reconstruction” and said a quick ChatGPT pass is “how you end up with a hand that wasn’t in the original.” A reply on r/software put it more bluntly: AI “will make people not look like themselves.” So scan the original, keep that file, and save the AI version as a copy with a different name.

MyHeritage for a box of family photos

MyHeritage is a family history company, and its photo tools were built for exactly this pile of prints. Photo Repair fixes scratches, tears, holes and stains; the Photo Enhancer sharpens faces; In Color adds color to black-and-white shots or brings back faded color. It also does something the others don’t: it puts a small wand, palette or moving-ball symbol in the corner of any enhanced, colorized or animated copy, so a cousin can tell it from the real thing years later.

The pricing is where people overspend. A few photos are free, with a MyHeritage logo on the result. Unlimited use is part of the Complete plan, which Apple’s App Store lists at $199.99 to $249.99 a year, but most of that money buys family tree records. MyHeritage’s separate Reimagine app for iPhone costs $49.99 a year (with a 7-day free trial) or $7.99 a month, and covers unlimited repair, enhancing, coloring and album scanning. If you only care about the photos, that’s the plan to buy. On Android or a computer, the same tools sit in MyHeritage’s own app and website, where unlimited use comes with Complete or a separate Photo subscription.

It isn’t flawless. An early r/Genealogy thread titled “My ancestors, the aliens” collected purple hands and extra faces found in jacket buttons. Run your worst photo first before paying.

Gemini or Google Photos for one free fix

For a single photo, Gemini, Google’s chatbot, is free and very good at this. Upload the scan and say what to fix and what to leave alone: “remove the scratches and the fold line, sharpen it slightly, don’t change anyone’s face, clothes or the background.” It edits with Google’s Nano Banana image model on the free plan; Google AI Plus ($4.99 a month) adds the newer Nano Banana 2.1.

Gemini redraws the whole picture, so lighting and small details can shift. One r/software user got “excellent results” on portraits with the paid Nano Banana Pro but noted the lighting changes too. Gemini adds a sparkle mark to images by default; a setting turns the visible mark off in most countries, and an invisible SynthID tag stays either way.

If the people in the photo are already in your Google Photos library, try Google Photos’ “Help me edit” instead: open the photo, tap Edit, and type “restore this old photo.” Google says it can use your other photos of the same person (its Face Groups) to get faces right, which helps with parents and grandparents you have newer pictures of. It is free but needs Face Groups turned on, a personal Google account and a supported country.

CodeFormer when the face has to stay the same person

CodeFormer is a free research model built to rebuild blurry faces. Its official demo on Hugging Face runs in your browser and has the one control the polished apps hide: a fidelity slider labeled “0 for better quality, 1 for better identity.” Low values give a crisper, more invented face; high values stay closer to what’s actually in the photo. For an ancestor, lean high.

Two cautions from its GitHub page. Only the demos on Hugging Face, Replicate and OpenXLab are run by its authors, who name sites like codeformer.net as using the model without permission; don’t pay them for a free model. And the license is non-commercial, so it’s for your family album, not a paid restoration business.

Why we’d skip Remini

Remini is the name most people know, and it does sharpen faces well. The problem is billing. Its App Store listing sells Pro at $9.99 a week and Lite at $4.99 to $7.99 a week, and its terms say uninstalling the app doesn’t cancel the subscription. Five weeks of Pro costs what a full year of MyHeritage’s Reimagine does.

Remini also leans toward beautifying. Its homepage pitches a Face Glow tool to give people “a new look and feel.” That’s fine for a selfie and wrong for a 1940s wedding photo.

When to pay a person instead

For the one photo that really matters, like the only picture of a great-grandparent with half a face missing, AI tools may never get it right. Human retouchers on r/PhotoshopRequest and r/estoration take these jobs, sometimes for a tip as small as $10 to $15 judging by recent posts, and they can ask you what color grandpa’s coat really was. Post a good scan and say what you know about the scene.

What we’d start with

A shoebox of family prints: MyHeritage’s free photos to test, then Reimagine at $49.99 a year if you like the results. One photo, free: Gemini, with a prompt that says what not to change. Someone already in your Google Photos: Help me edit. One blurry face you care about: CodeFormer with the slider pushed toward identity. Whatever you use, keep the original scan.

Related reading on ShipRadar: best free AI photo editor, best AI background remover, and AI tools for editing photos.