"Can't I just use ChatGPT for this?"

Yes, you can — and for a quick play, you should. This page is the honest version of why we exist anyway.

The honest admission

ChatGPT, Gemini and their cousins will colourise an old photo for free, in a minute, and the result will often look impressive on a phone screen. If you want a fun before-and-after to text your sister, you genuinely don't need us. We'd rather tell you that plainly than pretend otherwise.

Where it goes wrong — and why you might not notice

General AI tools repaint a photograph rather than repair it. In the process they quietly change faces — a jawline softened here, eyes respaced there, sometimes a whole face swapped for a plausible stranger. On a photo of a celebrity you'd spot it instantly. On a photo of your grandmother as a young woman, you may not — because the only person who truly remembers that face is the reason you're restoring the photo. That's the unsettling part: the tool most likely to change Nana's face is being judged by the person least able to check.

What we do differently

Every face is checked, mathematically. Software compares every face in the restoration against the same face in your original and measures how alike they are. If any face drifts — or if anyone appears or disappears — the photo is not sent. A person looks at it side by side with your original and either fixes it or refunds you. A chatbot will hand you a changed face with total confidence; we are built to refuse to.

The result is made for paper, not just a screen. Chat tools return a compressed image sized for a chat window. Ours is print-resolution, because the whole point of a restored family photo is usually a frame on the wall or real prints couriered to the family — from $4 a print, or the framed version from $89, anywhere in New Zealand.

No prompt skills required. Getting a good restoration out of a general chatbot takes careful prompting, retries and judgement. Here you upload the photo and we do the rest — the craft is our job, not yours.

A promise with a person behind it. Redo or refund, no questions — and a real person answers every email. Your photograph is deleted after 90 days and is never used to train anything. A free chatbot makes none of those promises.

When ChatGPT is the right choice

A quick curiosity, a meme, a rough "what might this look like in colour" — use the free tools, honestly. Where we earn our $1 is when the photo matters: when it's the only one of someone, when it's going in a frame, when the face has to still be their face. That's the difference between an AI image and a restored photograph.