Free restoration websites, and where they give out
The honest part first: the free sites are good, most damage is not severe, and if one of them has already sorted your photograph out then you did not need us and there is nothing more to read here.
Our difference is not a technique nobody else has. It is what the instructions demand, what they forbid outright, and the fact that badly damaged photographs are the case we tune against rather than the case we hope to avoid.
That makes for a narrow argument, and it can be checked for nothing in about four minutes.
Side by side
| Free online tools | MemoryMend | |
|---|---|---|
| Ordinary age and wear | Frequently excellent | Also good, and you have paid for it |
| A tear across a face | Often smoothed into somebody else | The case the instructions are written around |
| Faces | Routinely flattered, slimmed and made younger | Forbidden in the instructions, by name |
| Signs and writing | Often re-lettered into confident nonsense | Copied character for character, or left be |
| Missing pieces | Invented plausibly, and never mentioned | Invented plausibly, and written up on the page |
| Watermarks and sign-ups | Common — the free tier is the sales pitch | One free mend, no card, clean file when you buy |
What the free sites do well
Fading, light scratching, dust, general age. On that sort of wear the results are often indistinguishable from anything paid for, and the correct thing for us to say is that you should use them.
They are quick and cost nothing, so there is no reason not to try one first. We would rather you came here having already established that the easy tools cope with the easy prints.
Where they come unstuck, and it is always the same three
They flatter. Skin is smoothed, faces come back younger and more even, and the person in the photograph stops being the person you knew. It is a choice made by somebody optimising for the first glance rather than the likeness.
They re-letter. A shop fascia, a cap badge, a name inked on the reverse turns into confident gibberish, because filling in writing is exactly the sort of plausible guess these systems excel at.
They invent. Where a face has gone, something face-shaped appears in the gap. That is the failure that matters most, because it is the only one you cannot spot by looking — and it is the one we have not solved either. Our answer to it is to tell you where it happened.
What we do about it, in plain terms
The instructions sent with your photograph forbid all three explicitly, every single time: no flattering, slimming or making younger; every piece of lettering copied exactly or left alone; a destroyed area left destroyed.
Two of the three hold most of the time and are rechecked against real damaged scans whenever a word of them changes. The third does not hold at all — a gap is filled whatever we ask of it — so this page says so, and the missing-pieces page shows it happening rather than dressing up a defence we have not got.
What remains is worth having and is less than it was. Nothing is flattered, re-lettered, cropped, straightened, sharpened or colourised; and where something has been invented, you are told before you pay rather than after it is in a frame.
Where the free tools win outright
- They cost nothing, and for ordinary fading that settles it.
- They are immediate, with nobody to write to and nothing to buy.
- For a print that is merely old rather than damaged, paying anyone at all — this firm included — is money spent on a problem you have not got.
Settling it in four minutes
- Put your worst photograph through a free site. Not the easiest one — the tear across a face, the missing corner, the stain over somebody's shoulder.
- Send the same photograph here for nothing, then put the two results side by side at full size on a proper screen rather than a phone.
- If they match, use the free one. That is the entire test, and it is why the free mend here asks for the difficult photograph instead of the flattering one.
Questions
- Are you all using the same underlying technology?
- We are working in the same generation of tools, and claiming otherwise is precisely the sort of thing this site exists not to do. What differs is what we ask for, what we rule out, and which cases the wording is tuned against.
- So why pay at all?
- For severe damage, for photographs with faces and lettering in them, and for a mend that does not quietly improve the person. Where none of that applies, the free sites are the right answer.
- Why only one free photograph?
- Because a single hard photograph settles the question and ten easy ones do not. It also keeps the free mend affordable enough to still be here next month.
The cheapest way to decide
Have one photograph mended here for nothing and set it beside whatever else you were weighing up. No card, and a few minutes of your evening.
Mend one photograph, freeIf it doesn't look like the person you remember, you don't pay.