Quick Start

Getting Started with Nostalgia

New to Nostalgia? Walk through your first Photo Insight recommendation, repair, and Keeper review.

Your first restoration in 5 steps

1Upload a photo
Go to the Restore workspace and drag a photo onto the upload area, or click to browse. JPEG, PNG, and HEIC are accepted up to 75 MB. For best results, use a flatbed scan or Google PhotoScan capture.
Tip: If you only have a phone, hold it parallel to the print in even, indirect light. Avoid flash and overhead glare.
2Review the Photo Insight
Nostalgia generates a Photo Insight report — damage labels, capture quality, era estimate, and one next best action. It tells you which manual and AI tools are safe, which are optional, and which are blocked. If a better scan would help more than AI, it tells you.
3Run the recommendation
Start with the Photo Insight next best action: repair, crop, adjust, or rescan when the capture needs another pass. Each result returns to comparison before you continue, skip, or stop.
4Optional extras
After the first repair, you can add color to B&W photos, enhance detail, repair faces, remove backgrounds, generate caption help, or animate portraits. Each step is optional — stop whenever the photo feels right.
5Save to your Archive
Save the result to your private Archive. Organize into albums, search by caption, and come back anytime. Your Original is always preserved alongside the Keeper and version history.

After hundreds of test restorations during development, here’s what makes the biggest difference:

Capture quality matters most — a clean, well-lit phone capture beats a dusty flatbed scan.
Start with restore before colorize. Fixing damage first gives the colorization model cleaner input.
Don’t over-process. If the first restore looks good, stop there. More tools isn’t always better.
For severely damaged photos, the AI may not be able to fill in missing areas — it enhances what’s there, it doesn’t invent details.
Glossy photos can cause glare. Capture from a slight angle, or use diffused light.

Upload many photos at once and restore them in sequence with progress tracking.

Create a private space to share restored photos with relatives.

Get better results with the right scan technique.

Learn when to use each platform and how they work together.

Upload an old photo, let Photo Insight check it before repair, and keep the restored version with the original. Free to start.