Photo restoration services compared
There are three ways to have a damaged photograph repaired, and they are priced so differently that the choice is usually made by how many photographs you have rather than by quality.
A conservation studio treats the object. A freelance retoucher works on your file by hand. A service like this one repairs your file without hands, at a pack price, in minutes.
This page is about which of the three fits which situation, including the situations where the answer is not us.
Side by side
| Studio or retoucher | MemoryMend | |
|---|---|---|
| What is repaired | The print itself, or your file, by a person | Your file, by us, from the scan you send |
| How long | Days to weeks | A few minutes for one, about half an hour for fifty |
| Priced by | The hour, or per photograph | The pack, paid once |
| Sensible for | One photograph that matters more than the others | A box you have been meaning to deal with |
| Do you send the original | Usually, if the object is being treated | Never. The print stays with you |
| Can you see it first | Rarely, and usually after a quote | Yes. One photograph repaired free, no card |
Mail-in studios
The traditional trade: you post the photograph, somebody works on it, and it comes back with a repaired print or a file. The work can be superb, and for a photograph that is itself valuable there is no substitute.
The two costs are the obvious one and the one nobody mentions. The obvious one is money, usually per photograph and usually with a minimum. The other is that your only copy spends a fortnight in the mail, twice.
Freelance retouchers
A person, a scan and an hourly rate. This is the right answer for a difficult single photograph where judgement matters — a group portrait where three faces need different treatment, a photograph whose damage has to be interpreted rather than removed.
It scales exactly as badly as you would expect. Fifty photographs is fifty times the work and roughly fifty times the fee, and the good ones are booked.
Pack-priced repair, which is what this is
One photograph in, one repaired photograph out, several at a time, for a price set by the pack rather than by the hour. That is what makes a shoebox affordable and it is the only reason this business exists.
What you give up is a pair of eyes on each photograph. We tune the instructions carefully and we look at real damaged scans every time they change, but nobody is deciding, photograph by photograph, what your grandmother's dress should look like.
Where a person is plainly better
- Anything that has to be interpreted rather than repaired. Where the damage has removed something a person would recognize as important — a hand, a sign, a face at the edge — a retoucher decides what to do about it and tells you what they did. We do not decide: the gap is filled, plausibly, and the only record of it is your own scan beside the repair.
- Anything that needs the object treated. Flaking, mold in the emulsion, a print stuck to glass: all bench work, none of it possible from a file.
- Anything where you want to talk to whoever is doing it. That is a real requirement and it is worth paying for.
Which to choose
- One photograph, and it is the photograph: a studio or a retoucher, and the money is well spent.
- A box, an album, or a drawer you have been avoiding: a pack, because the alternative is doing nothing, which is what most people do.
- Not sure which you have: repair one free here first. It costs nothing and it tells you which of the two problems you actually have.
Questions
- Is a service like this cheaper than a studio?
- Per photograph, by a wide margin. That is a statement about volume rather than about quality: a studio is one person's time and this is not, and the two prices are not measuring the same thing.
- Do you offer a person to look at my photograph?
- Not as a service. If a repair comes back wrong, write to us — a person reads every reply, and we can run it again with a stronger instruction. That is a correction, not a retouching service.
- Can I use both?
- That is often the right answer. Repair the box here, and send the one photograph that deserves a person to somebody who does that work.
The cheapest way to decide
Repair one photograph here for nothing and compare it with whatever else you were considering. No card, and a few minutes.
If it doesn't look like the person you remember, you don't pay.
Repair one photograph, free