How to fix a faded, scratched or torn old photo for free

Your grandfather in uniform, 1946. A crease runs straight through his shoulder, one corner is missing, and the whole picture has turned the colour of weak tea. It is the only photo of him from those years. You do not want to hand it to a stranger, and you do not want to learn Photoshop for it.

The short answer

Never repair the print itself. Make a good digital copy and repair that. There are three ways: an automatic repair that takes half a minute, a free editor where you do it by hand, or a professional restorer for the photos that really matter. Which one fits depends on the damage and on how much time you want to spend.

Step 1: a good copy

• Clean gently. Only a soft brush or a blower against dust. No water, no cloths. Hold the print by its edges.
• Scan at 600 dpi or more if you have a scanner. Save as JPG at high quality, or TIFF if you want to keep a master.
• No scanner? A phone photo works too: the print flat on a table, the phone straight above it, daylight from the side, no flash. Fill the frame with the photo.
• Torn photos: lay the pieces together on a dark background and capture them as one image. Do not use tape on the print.

More on scanning, photographing or sending photos out: how to digitise old photos.

Step 2: choose how to repair

Way	Good for	Cost
Automatic repair in the browser	Fading, dust, small scratches and creases, black and white photos you would like to see in colour	Free options exist
A free editor, by hand	Scratches and spots you want to control yourself, one by one	Free, but it takes time
A professional restorer	Large missing pieces, faces that are badly damaged, photos for a print or a funeral	Paid, per photo

Automatic

On thememorypalace.ai/restore you choose one photo: a JPG, PNG, WEBP or HEIC file up to 8 MB. It is repaired, and coloured if it was black and white, usually within half a minute. You see it before and after, side by side. It is free and you do not need an account. The result is labelled as made with AI, and the restored version is kept for seven days, then deleted automatically.

By hand

Three free editors have a healing tool that paints over a scratch with the texture around it: Photopea in the browser, GIMP on a computer, and Snapseed on a phone. Work zoomed in, in small strokes, and on a copy of the file. For fading, the levels or curves tool brings back contrast.

What repair can and cannot do

Automatic repair does not know what was under the crease. It fills in what is likely. On a background that is fine. On an eye or a mouth it can make a face look slightly different from the person. And the colours of a colourised photo are an estimate, not a memory: the uniform may have been another green. So always keep the original scan next to the repaired version, and read what colourising does well and what it does not.

Then put a name under it

A repaired photo without a name is still an anonymous photo. Write down who it is, the year, the place, and whatever the family remembers. In The Memory Palace the repaired photo hangs in a room of its own, with his name, his story and the original scan next to it.