Why I built OldPics

The prints I actually want to fix are old family ones. A scratch across a face, a tear at the edge, a stain from an album that got damp, color that faded until everyone in the picture looks the same washed-out yellow. The person is still there. The paper is just worn out.

I tried the tools that already do this, and they all asked for something before they would touch the photo. An account before you can see a result. A subscription if you want to keep going. A watermark on the file you download. For a small stack of family prints, that is a lot of product wrapped around a small job. I didn’t want a login standing in front of the first restore, and I didn’t want a plan that bills again next month after the album is back on the shelf. So I built OldPics, and I kept it narrow. It repairs scratches, tears, stains and fading. That is the job I wanted it to do.

How I built it

It is Angular with server-side rendering, running on Cloudflare Workers. Angular is what I already build in, so I didn’t start by learning a new framework just to ship a photo page. The page is the studio. You drop the print, you run a restore, you download the file. I wanted the visit to be that, and not a tour of settings before you get a result.

The free restores are counted on the device, not on an account. Each device gets 5 free Standard restores. No signup, no card. I did it that way because an account would have meant email and passwords before anyone could find out if a scratch would come off. A count on the device is enough to give those first restores away and to know when they have been used. I wrote what that free tier includes, and what it doesn’t, on restore old photos free.

After the five, more restores come from a one-time pack, not a subscription. $9 is 20 High quality restores. $29 is 100. Creem is the merchant of record, so the payment goes through them and I don’t store the card, and buying a pack does not start a plan. You pay once. The credits stay on that device. Nothing renews. A box of prints is not a monthly habit, and I didn’t want the pricing to pretend that it is.

Where it stops

It is good at the damage that is sitting on a picture you can still see: the scratch, the tear, the stain, the fade. A soft or blurry scan stays soft, because the restore does not invent detail that was never in the photo. A large missing area is filled from what is nearby, so that fill is a guess, not the piece that was lost. Colorize is a guess too. A black-and-white print has no color record, so the colors it adds are estimated.

If you have a print like that, drop it on OldPics.