Colorize Old Photos — Pro, on our server
The scan matters more than the AI. Colorization can only paint the detail it can see, so the single biggest improvement you can make costs nothing: digitise the print properly. A flatbed scanner at 600 DPI beats a phone photo; a phone photo taken square-on in soft daylight beats one taken at an angle under a ceiling bulb. Crop to the image itself — scanner lids and tablecloths confuse nothing, but they waste the resolution budget — and use the crop tool on your own device before uploading.
Colorize the damage, don’t hide it. Tears, foxing and creases come back in colour, and usually recede visually once the surrounding image reads naturally. What this tool deliberately does not do is invent repairs: nothing is painted over, nothing is “restored” into the frame that the camera never captured. For genealogy and family-history work that restraint is a feature — a colorized-but-honest print, labelled as colorized, keeps its value as a record.
Keep the original. Always. The colorized image is a derivative for sharing and framing; the untouched scan is the archive. Store both, name them so the difference is obvious in twenty years, and if the print matters, keep the physical print too. If the scan is small, colorize first and then enlarge the result with the on-device upscaler — colour first gives the upscaler more to work with.
Privacy, because these are usually family faces. This is the one MiniPx tool that runs on a server, and it treats your photo the way you would want a lab to: encrypted in transit, processed once, deleted on completion and in all cases within 24 hours, never used for training. Every other tool on the site — including the crop and upscale steps above — runs entirely on your own device.
The same colorizer also sits behind our pages on how to add color to a black and white photo, a black and white to color converter and colorizing wedding photos.