You get the real result, not a blurry preview.Free means the full-size restored photo — the same file a paid tool would sell you.
Drop in a faded, soft or torn photograph and get a version back that you can actually print — and the original is gone from the server before you have finished looking at the result.
The hard numbers, so you know before you upload. Every value here is what the server actually enforces.
| Free | With a pass | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free. No account, no sign-up, no card. | €5 for 30 days, or €3 for 24 hours |
| Photos per batch | 10 | 1000 |
| Jobs at once | 2 | 4 |
| Input resolution up to | 2000 px | 3000 px |
| Output resolution up to | 8000 px | 12000 px |
| Maximum file size | 99 MB per photo | |
| Where it runs | On our own graphics cards in the Netherlands. Your photo is never sent to a third-party service. | |
| Your upload | Deleted the moment processing finishes, success or failure — on both tiers. | |
| Watermark | None, on any output, on either tier. | |
The free tier is not a trial and does not run out. What the pass buys is volume and resolution — the restoration model is the same either way.
One person. I build PicReviver and I run it, on a desktop machine with two graphics cards that sits in a room in the Netherlands and stays on day and night. There is no team, no investor and nobody to escalate your e-mail to: if something breaks, the person who reads about it is the person who fixes it, usually the same day.
The reason this site exists rather than another background remover is a box of my grandparents' photographs that had gone brown and soft at the edges. The models that fix that are open and free to run. The only thing standing between them and a normal person with a shoebox of prints is somebody willing to keep a computer switched on.
Places like MyHeritage, Remini and VanceAI rent their graphics cards from a cloud provider by the second, so your photo costs them money the moment it lands. That cost comes back to you as credits, a subscription or a watermark. I bought the cards once. Restoring your photo costs me a few seconds of electricity on a bill I was already paying, which is not enough to build a payment page around. The ads on the page cover the power and the domain, and that is the entire business model. If enormous batches ever start costing real money there will be a paid tier for those, and the normal tool will stay free.
Old photos are personal: your grandparents' wedding, a faded picture of a parent, a child who has since grown up. They are treated that way here.
The full details are in the privacy policy, written in plain language.
PicReviver sharpens and enlarges photos, restores faces, colourises black & white pictures and converts colour to monochrome, with published models (CodeFormer, DDColor) running on the cards in that machine. On a faded, soft or low-resolution print the difference is often startling.
It is not magic, and I would rather say so here than have you find out with a photograph that matters. A badly torn print has limits: the model invents what was in the tear, and inventing is not remembering. Colourisation is an educated guess about which blue that dress was, not a historical record — lovely to look at, useless as evidence. Faces that are too small in the frame come back looking like somebody's cousin. If you want the long version, I wrote it up: photo restoration, explained honestly.
Found a bug, got a suggestion, or a photo that came back worse than it went in? Send it over — it lands with me, and I read all of it.
If PicReviver isn't actually the tool you need, the quick chooser guide on ShinobiTools sorts photo, audio, video and document jobs into the right one in under a minute.
A word about the name. Sam Ridder is a pen name. I would rather my own name did not become the first result for every search about photo restoration, so I write under this one. Everything else on this page — the machine, the two cards, the box of brown photographs — is exactly as described.