8 Free Apps for Restoring and Animating Old Photos

Bring old photos to life and animate your memories with these five apps

We all have old photos that we wish were in better condition: portraits of family members we never had the chance to meet, people we haven’t seen for decades, or places we once lived or used to visit. If only we could restore their original quality.

The good news is that analog and digital photography are working together better than ever. Thanks to cell phones and artificial intelligence, today we can accurately reconstruct photos of faces, objects, and landscapes. This list of free apps will enable you to improve blurred and washed-out images, give them a new look, and, in some cases, animate a gesture, person, or landscape.

The magic of old photos

Old photos are charged with emotion. Not only do they contain valuable information about our past, but we can also appreciate that people rarely had the opportunities to take photos before technology evolved. In the early 20th century, people would have to wait for photographers to visit their towns if they wanted to have their photos taken. Later, when cameras became popular, people discovered the valuable opportunity to capture the best moments of their lives on film. Back then, however, taking photographs was an expensive hobby that was saved for special occasions. Moreover, it required patience: people used to have to wait days to see the final results.

These are just a few of the reasons why old photos are so symbolic. When we come across them, we appreciate that they have meaning, expectations, a raison d'être. There’s this sense that the older the photo, the more valuable it is.

The image below is one of the oldest photographs on record. It is considered the first photograph of a person, who appears in it by accident. A shoe shiner was at work when the inventor of photography, Louis Daguerre, took a photo of a Paris landscape.

We've learned that there were people already making cat memes way back in the early days of photography! You can discover more curious stories about the advent of photography in this Domestika article.

5 Free Apps for Restoring and Animating Old Photos

If you would like to improve your old photos but aren’t sure how, we recommend you try out these five free apps that you can download on your cell phone.

Google Photoscan

What does it do? It scans your photos using smart technology.

This app allows you to transition from the analog to the digital world very smoothly. “Photos from the past, meet scanner from the future,” writes Google. This app uses intelligent scanning technology. Instead of using a physical scanner, you simply scan a photo using your cell phone camera.

This app does much more than simply scanning an image well. If you provide various shots of the same photo, the app will choose the best parts of each photo to compose the final photograph. Thanks to its ability to detect edges, it will crop the image automatically. It also corrects perspective and gets rid of any reflections. Then, using Google Photos, we can categorize our images, organize their data, and share photos with whomever we want.

Deep Nostalgia

What does it do? It allows you to animate a photo with gestures.

Deep Nostalgia is an app created by online genealogy platform MyHeritage, which went viral a few days after its launch. This app can animate old family photos using artificial intelligence to manipulate images and create gestures.

This app uses an artificial intelligence technique, known as deep learning, to automatically animate the faces that appear in photos that have been uploaded to its system. Easy and free to use, and offering realistic results, this app leaves users wondering if there’s anything artificial intelligence can’t do. Like most deep fakes, the software can even animate sketches, statues, and illustrations.

One of Deep Nostalgia’s most impressive features is its ability to create gestures that often match what those photographed, and who we know, actually do in real life.

On social media, some people describe Deep Nostalgia as "magical", while others find it disturbing. The developers behind this technology have responded to the latter, explaining that this app was intended for bringing to life photos of old relatives who we did not get to meet or who we don’t have any videos of. They say it should not be used to create fake videos of living people.

Remini

What does it do? Restores old photos.

Using professional film production-level artificial intelligence, Remini converts low-resolution, blurry, pixelated, old and damaged photos and videos into crisp HD images. The app has already processed over 100 million photos and videos while its system has been updated and improved hundreds of times to become the intelligent program that it is today.

Remini uses generative artificial intelligence technology to repair blurry and low-res images. Although it was not created exclusively for improving old photos, that’s often what people use it for.

Colorize

What does it do? Colorize old photos.

This app allows you to restore and colorize old photos. Its tools and filters use artificial intelligence to produce effective results. There are three options: colorize, enhance, and retouch. The first option is the most popular tool given that it automatically improves image quality. Retouching helps to remove any marks you can see on your photographs.

The app also offers simple color filters and tries to guess what the original colors were. Users usually love sharing before and after posts.

Photos Revive

What does it do? Colorize with a little help from the user.

This app allows us to colorize images as realistically as possible with a little help from the user. To help artificial intelligence accurately work out the tones and colors of the original, it asks us to enter any data that we remember or might know.

The app is particularly great for restoring portraits.

TouchRetouch

What does it do? Removes objects

A powerful tool for removing unwanted objects or stains from old photos. It's especially useful for retouching portraits. Additionally, its professional editing features allow you to correct imperfections like blemishes or spots in an intuitive manner.

Afterlight

What does it do? Image correction

The Afterlight app offers a variety of editing tools that can be useful for restoring old photos. With its unique filters, advanced editing tools, as well as textures and overlays, you could enhance and correct old images, adding dust textures or adjusting colors and tones to improve the appearance of faded or damaged photos.

Krome Studio

What does it do? Enhance photo editing

Krome Studio is an app that allows transforming photos through background changes and design recommendations. You can enhance the color, lighting, and make corrections, which can be useful for revitalizing old photos.

Colors, sharpness, blurriness, and quality. All these elements can be improved in a matter of minutes. Take advantage of the latest technology so you can revisit the past in high definition!

Interested in exploring the world of photography? Check out Domestika’s photography courses.

English version by @eloiseedgington.

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