Restore old photos for free with AI

Many of us have old photographs lying around in a box or an album somewhere. Old photos are a way to retain memories from the relatively distant past so that we can share them with younger generations. However, so many times when you look at an old photo, the more decades pass, the blurrier it looks. Now, there’s a way to stop old photographs from becoming blurrier, and it’s absolutely free to use. 

Why do old photos look blurry?

For starters, you’re not losing your mind. While that photograph of you from the 80s itself hasn’t changed in quality, our perception of such media has. When you looked at the photo in the 80s, it was a pretty rad pic. You were proud. Everyone was recognizable, and none of you could believe how clear and crisp it was. The technology back then was amazing - but only back then. Since then, technology has improved 100-fold. 

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We have a far higher expectation of photos today. If you can’t see someone’s pores and their fear of their future in their eyes, it’s not a good enough photo. There was nothing wrong with your predecessor's skills with a camera, the camera was simply just not good enough for what we deem acceptable today. Luckily, there’s a tool to turn your old photographs into ones you can haul out proudly at family dinners, without anyone squinting awkwardly or asking ‘Who’s that?’ 

The tool that we are referring to is called RestorePhotos.io and it is truly incredible. Using the advanced capabilities of AI image recognition and regeneration software, the utility scans your old blurry photographs and gives them a crisp edge. But, that’s just my inference. Here’s what the company behind it, Vercel, says about it. 

‘It uses an ML model from the Applied Research Center called GFPGAN on Replicate to restore face photos. This application gives you the ability to upload any photo, which will send it through this ML Model using a Next.js API route, and return your restored photo. After cloning the repo, go to Replicate to make an account and put your API key in a file called .env. If you'd also like to do rate limiting, create an account on UpStash, create a Redis database, and populate the two environment variables in .env as well. If you don't want to do rate limiting, you don't need to make any changes.’ 

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If you’re not the most tech-savvy person and the paragraph above flew over your head, don’t worry. All you really need to know is that using RestorePhotos.io is completely free, and that it can bring life back into old photographs and keep those memories fresh.

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