Recolor the Past App: From a Printed Photo to a Restored Family Album

Recolor the Past is built around a simple three-stage workflow: scan or add photos → Studio → Photos.

1. Scan or add photos

Use the camera scanner for printed photographs or import several existing files from your gallery. Camera scanning includes live border detection, a manual-corners fallback and a glare-free capture mode. Name or choose a folder when adding images so a family event, archive box or person stays organized from the beginning.

2. Prepare everything in Studio

Studio holds source images that are not finalized. Open any photo to rotate it, correct its four corners, crop it and adjust exposure, contrast, saturation and warmth. These manual edits are applied before AI processing, remain under your control and become the source for the preview.

Select one photo or a whole folder when you are ready. Black-and-white scanning and local organization are free. You can also save prepared scans to Apple Photos or Android gallery when permission is available.

3. Create and compare a preview

Choose Colorize, faded-color restoration, scratch repair, blur reduction, face restoration or other image-repair options. Recolor the Past shows the cost before a full-resolution export. Previews are free and let you drag between the original and restored result, change settings and try again.

Processing continues in the background, so you can leave the workspace and return later. An active session appears in Studio until you finalize it.

4. Finalize into Photos

Completed results move into Photos while keeping the same album identity. Albums can be collapsed, renamed or deleted from the app without deleting copies already saved in the device gallery. Cloud-only results sync to the device when their album is opened; old device-only files are not uploaded again automatically.

Full-resolution images can be viewed, shared individually or exported as a batch ZIP. Each file keeps the restoration settings chosen for that specific photo.

Credits and privacy

Basic colorization costs one credit; optional restoration passes can add to the total. Credits are charged only when a full-resolution result is created, not for previews. The app keeps durable device copies independently of the temporary cloud copy, and your family photos are not used to train AI.

Get Recolor the Past

Download Recolor the Past on the Apple App Store or get it on Google Play. Availability varies by region.