Colorize Old Photos with AI: 5 Apps Compared (2026)
5 apps to colorize old family photos, compared on what each is built for. MyHeritage® In Color targets genealogy portraits. Palette.fm needs no account. DeOldify for landscapes. Plus the workflow that works.
Genealogy Editor, Incarn
In short
5 AI colorization apps compared: MyHeritage® In Color is designed for genealogy portraits (a few free colorizations). Palette.fm requires no account. DeOldify is open source and gives the most control, useful for landscapes. Golden rule: restore physical damage before colorizing. Colorizing before animating also gives the animation AI more information to work with.
TL;DR: 5 AI colorization apps compared: MyHeritage® In Color is designed for genealogy portraits (a few free colorizations). Palette.fm requires no account. DeOldify is open source and gives the most control. Golden rule: restore physical damage before colorizing. Colorizing before animating also gives the animation AI more information to work with.
There's something strange about old black-and-white family photos. You look at them, you recognize the faces, but they seem to belong to another world. Distant. Abstract.
AI colorization changes that. Not in a spectacular way, not as some miracle transformation. Just skin tones, blue in the eyes, green in the leaves behind them. And suddenly, these are real people.
Here are 5 AI photo colorization apps, what each one is built for, and how to compare them on your own photos, from great-grandparent portraits to group shots from the 1950s.
Why Colorize an Old Family Photo
The black and white in old photos wasn't an artistic choice. It was a technical constraint. The people in those photos lived in a world of color, just like us. Their clothes had colors. The walls of their kitchen had a color. So did the car in the yard.
AI colorization doesn't reinvent the past. It restores something that was there, something the technology of the time simply couldn't capture.
For families doing genealogy research, the impact is real: colorized photos create a significantly stronger emotional connection with previous generations. Children take more interest in them. Ancestors become people, not historical figures.
How AI Colorizes a Black-and-White Photo
Modern AI colorization tools use neural networks trained on millions of pairs of color and black-and-white images. The model learns statistical associations: this texture looks like human skin, this shape looks like a sky, this pattern looks like wool fabric from the 1940s.
When it analyzes a new photo, it makes probabilistic inferences about each area of the image. The result isn't an exact historical reconstruction. It's a plausible estimate, based on what was statistically true at that time.
For family photos, "historically plausible" is generally good enough. And current models are remarkably good at skin tones, particularly in indoor portraits.
The 5 Best Apps to Colorize an Old Photo
MyHeritage® In Color
Best for: family portraits, genealogy
MyHeritage® In Color is the colorization tool MyHeritage® offers to its genealogy users, designed for old family portraits.
It is specifically optimized for genealogical photos. Formal portraits, group photos of varying quality, old slightly blurry prints. That's exactly the type of image you probably have in your shoeboxes.
Because it targets portraits, it's the logical first stop for faces. Check the skin tones for greenish or orange casts, a classic colorization error. The free version allows a few colorizations without a subscription.
Its focus is portraits: for landscapes and photos with a lot of vegetation, compare it with a general-purpose tool.
Palette.fm
Best for: quick batch processing, no account needed
Palette.fm works without signing up. You upload, you download. That's it.
It offers several color palettes for the same photo, which lets you compare different interpretations. It's well suited to a quick first look before more detailed treatment.
Perfect if you have fifty photos to process and just want to see which ones are worth more detailed treatment.
DeOldify
Best for: technical users, landscapes
DeOldify is open source. You can install it locally or use it via Google Colab notebooks. It's more technical than the others, but gives you full control over the parameters.
Its open parameters make it a good fit for landscapes, buildings, and outdoor scenes, where you may want to tune the result. On portraits, check the skin tones as you would with any tool. It pairs very well with a finishing step in a photo editor.
Colorize.cc
Best for: occasional use, simple interface
Clean, simple interface. Colorize.cc does what you ask without any fuss, which suits occasional use on decent-quality photos. A useful second opinion if another tool's result on a particular image doesn't convince you.
ImageColorizer.com
Best for: colorization combined with restoration
ImageColorizer combines colorization and restoration in a single interface. Useful if your photo has scratches or slightly damaged areas on top of being black and white. Handy for moderately degraded photos, since both steps happen in one place.
How to Colorize an Old Photo in 3 Steps
A simple workflow that works for most family photos:
Step 1: Prepare the source file
Output quality depends directly on input quality. Scan at 600 DPI minimum if you have a print. If you already have a low-resolution digital file, upscale it first with a tool like Remini or jpgHD before colorizing. A blurry, low-resolution photo that's been colorized is still blurry and low-resolution.
Step 2: Colorize
For family portraits: start with MyHeritage In Color. If the result isn't satisfying, try Palette.fm to compare different interpretations of the same photo.
For landscapes and outdoor scenes: DeOldify or ImageColorizer are worth comparing.
Step 3: Final adjustments
AI colorization is a starting point, not a finished product. A slight saturation and white balance adjustment in a basic photo editor can make a real difference. A few seconds that change the final result.
Preparing Your Photo Before Colorization: What AI Can't Fix
AI colorizes. It doesn't restore physical damage.
If your photo has scratches, brown stains, torn areas, or badly damaged sections, colorize it as-is and you'll have a damaged photo... in color. That's not necessarily an improvement.
The optimal order: restore the damage first, then improve the resolution, then colorize. It takes more time, but the difference is visible in the final result. The guide on improving old photo quality with AI covers the restoration step in detail, with 7 tools compared.
After Colorization: Animate the Photo to Truly Bring It Back to Life
Colorization is one step. AI animation is another. And they stack.
Color gives the animation AI more information to work with: skin tones, color contrasts, and textures around the face and eyes. In black and white, it works from less.
If you want to try it directly: Incarn, which we make, offers a free first try at signup (a preview with a watermark). You upload your colorized photo and get an animation in about a minute. After that, each animation costs 1.99 EUR, in HD and without a watermark.
What Colorization Really Changes for Family Genealogy
Families doing genealogy spend a lot of time reconstructing facts. Dates, places, family trees. That's useful. But facts don't create emotional connection.
Colorized photos do something different. They make ancestors human, in the concrete sense of the word. Not grey figures on old cardboard, but people with eyes of a certain color, clothes from a certain era, an expression that sometimes resembles yours in an unsettling way.
For the full picture of AI tools useful in genealogy research, including handwriting recognition, records search, and tree building, best AI tools for genealogy research covers 11 tools in detail.
Frequently Asked Questions About AI Colorization of Old Photos
Is AI colorization of photos historically accurate?
No, and that's important to understand. AI makes statistical inferences based on visual patterns. It doesn't know what color your great-grandmother's dress actually was. The result is "plausible" for the era and fabric type, not "accurate." For family or emotional use, that's enough. For rigorous historical research, specify that the colorization is AI-generated.
Can you colorize a badly damaged photo?
Yes, but restore the physical damage first. Scratches, stains, missing areas: address those with a restoration tool before colorizing. Colorizing a damaged photo gives you a damaged photo in color.
Is free old photo colorization good enough?
For most family uses, yes. Palette.fm and MyHeritage® In Color (free version) are a good place to start. Paid versions mainly offer more volume, additional palette options, and better results on difficult cases.
How long does AI colorization take?
Online, 10 to 30 seconds per photo. With DeOldify running locally, a few minutes depending on your hardware. Preparing the source file often takes longer than the colorization itself.
Can you animate a photo after colorizing it?
Yes, and it's worth doing. Restoring and colorizing first gives the animation AI a cleaner, richer image to work from. Incarn, which we make, animates both color and black-and-white photos, and a high-resolution source helps in both cases. First try free (a watermarked preview), then 1.99 EUR per animation.
Genealogy Editor, Incarn
Claire is a certified genealogist with 12 years of experience in family history research. She specializes in European archives and photo preservation techniques.
Deep Nostalgia® and MyHeritage® are trademarks of MyHeritage Ltd. Incarn is not affiliated with MyHeritage. Comparisons (features, pricing) are provided for information only and reflect publicly available offerings at the time of publication; they are subject to change.