I Used AI to Bring Old Black-and-White Family Photos to Life

Giving New Life to Old Family Photos
Palette.fm
MyHeritage
Hotpot
Img2Go

Key Takeaways

Palette.fm offers great colorizing options, with pricing starting at $49 for 75 photos.
MyHeritage provides high-quality colorized images, but the full subscription is pricey at $184.
Hotpot is a trustworthy option for colorizing photos, offering free limited downloads and 1000 credits for $12.

These websites use AI to help you convert old black-and-white photos into color and the results are amazing. The key is to find one that balances quality with price for the size of your project. Most have free options that you can try out too.
Giving New Life to Old Family Photos

Turning old black-and-white family photos into color is incredibly fascinating and, with AI technology, very easy to do by yourself.

I wanted to keep my family photos private, so to demonstrate these AI tools I’m going to use some photos from a collection of free-to-use images on the Library of Congress website.

So far, AI can’t produce historically accurate colors. For that, you would need a historian and a Photoshop expert to research the people in the image, and the time period, and to produce something realistic.

For most people, including myself, accuracy doesn’t matter. What’s important is that some color has been applied somewhat realistically to make my old family photos more vibrant. Like reading a magazine versus a novel, adding color to black-and-white photos makes it more entertaining to stop and wonder what life was like back then.

The first couple of entries did an impressive job, but I’ve also included a few alternative options because the pricing plans vary significantly from one website to another.
Palette.fm
Palette.fm AI colorizer homepage

Out of all the AI colorizers I’ve tried, Palette.fm takes the number one spot for being superbly intuitive to use while also producing fantastic results.

There are two standout features: the first is the range of colorization options you can choose from. The second is the ability to change the written description of the image, which you can use to improve the results or try a different color style.
Palette.fm text prompt for changing image color

You can test out as many photos as you want and download them at 500 x 500 resolution, though it will come with the Palette.fm watermark. By making an account, you can get 1 free credit.

Once I got started colorizing old photos, it was hard to stop. For a one-off cost of $49, you could get 75 photos processed, a good amount if you were putting together a slide show of old family photos or printing your photos out and turning them into a scrapbook.

If you are tackling a bigger project and want to get through troves of old images, then $72 for a one-year subscription will get you 480 credits and a few albums worth of beautifully colorized images.

There’s quite a range of options besides the ones mentioned, so make sure to take a look at what’s on offer.
MyHeritage
My Heritiage website homepage

This website is known for its genealogy services for things like locating family members or building a family tree, but it also has a great tool for turning black-and-white photos into color.

Unlike Palette.fm, it produces just one colored version of your photo with no way to change the style of colors. I found the quality of the results was high, and the images turned out beautifully, so the lack of customization options didn’t matter hugely.
My Heritage AI colorized photo

The web page is clean and user-friendly and all you need to do is drag and drop an image to start the process. You will be prompted to create an account to see the results. Hit the download button if you want to save the image, but it will come with a watermark.

To remove the watermark you will need a «Complete» subscription. The good thing is, this annual subscription means you can use the colorizer tool an unlimited number of times. The bad thing is it will set you back $184. Not exactly great value for one-off photos or small projects.

MyHeritage also has a quirky AI tool for animating old photos, but unless you are serious about using their core services, a subscription is probably not worth it.
Hotpot
Hotpot AI colorizer homepage

There are a lot of websites offering AI colorizer tools that are hard to verify if they are trustworthy, but Hotpot has been around for a long time and is a safe option. It clearly does a better job on some images than others, so expect to get a few misses.

One advantage of using Hotpot is that you can colorize and download images at a limited file size for free. If you change the size of the image to Full the cost of processing an image is 25 credits. You can buy a one-off purchase of 1000 credits for $12, which will give you about 40 images.

Hotpot was built on the same code as MyHeritiage, though it lacks some of the later advancements that were licensed exclusively to MyHeritage. Nonetheless, if you have tons of black-and-white family photos you want to run through a website and don’t mind a low resolution, Hotpot could work for you.
Img2Go
Img2Go preview of colorized image

Img2Go has many different editing tools in one place, including an AI colorizer. Unfortunately, the results can be patchy, quite literally in some cases. In the image above, you can see that the skin around the hands has patches of gray.

There are two controls you can play with to change the results, but they’re a little vague as to what they do. One of the options is to change the AI model from People and Nature to Generic. While the other is a Render Factor setting, which suggests that increasing the number can improve the quality.
Img2Go AI coloprizer page

You get 10 free credits that you can use to download an image without a watermark at a low resolution. So if you’re hard-pressed, you can get a few free images from this site.

Bringing old black-and-white images back to life using AI can be a fascinating journey into the past, and it can be incredible to see these images revitalized with color and detail. Whether you’re looking to add a modern twist to your old family photos or simply curious about the possibilities of AI, give these tools a try and see what you get.

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