How Restore works
Restore is a free, private old-photo restorer. It runs entirely in your browser as an installable PWA: a CodeFormer AI model restores faces, a super-resolution model enhances the whole image, and an optional DDColor model colorizes black & white photos — all compiled to WebAssembly. Your photos never leave your device.
Your photo is never uploaded
There is no server and no backend. When you load a photo, your browser runs the AI models locally and produces the result on a canvas. Nothing you load is ever sent over the network — not the original photo, not the result. The site's Content-Security-Policy (connect-src 'self', plus only the public model CDNs) even restricts which hosts the page may contact, so the privacy guarantee is enforced by the browser itself.
The only network access is the models
On the first run, Restore fetches public model files: the SPAN super-resolution model, the CodeFormer face-restore model, the (optional) DDColor colorizer (all from Hugging Face), and the MediaPipe face-detection model (from Google Cloud Storage). Those downloads are plain GETs of generic public files — your photo is never uploaded to them. The onnxruntime-web + MediaPipe WASM runtimes are served same-origin from this site. Once downloaded, all of it is cached (browser cache + the service worker's Cache Storage), so the tool keeps working with no connection at all.
WebGPU when you have it, WebAssembly otherwise
When your browser supports it, the models run on your graphics card (WebGPU) for a faster path; otherwise they fall back to CPU-based WebAssembly, which works everywhere. Either way, processing stays on your device.
AI-assisted — results vary
Face restoration and colorization are generative models making an informed guess. They can dramatically improve blurry, small, or damaged faces and add realistic color to old photos, but they can also hallucinate detail or invent colors that were never there. Use the face-restore strength dial to control how aggressive the restoration is, and treat the output as a faithful enhancement, not a guaranteed reconstruction of the original scene.
Offline-capable PWA
Install Restore to your home screen or desktop. A service worker caches the app shell and all the models, so restoring photos keeps working with no internet connection once the models have loaded once.
No ads, no tracking, no account
There is no signup. This build ships with zero third-party scripts and a strict privacy policy. If monetization is added later, it will be environment-gated and off by default — the on-device privacy promise for your photos is never traded away.