What old photo restoration costs

Hand retouching, per photo

A retoucher works on your scan in an editing program, cloning texture over scratches, rebuilding tone and, if you ask, colourising by hand. It is skilled work and it is priced per photo, usually in tiers by how much damage there is, with heavy tears and missing areas costing several times a light clean-up. Turnaround is days to weeks. The result depends entirely on the person; a good retoucher is the best option for a single irreplaceable print with serious damage, and the most expensive per photo by a wide margin.

We are not naming firms or figures here because they vary by country and by year; search for a studio near you and ask for a quote on a specific scan. Expect to pay per photo, and expect a fee for revisions.

Weekly app subscriptions

The best-known phone apps are sold as subscriptions. Remini, for example, charges roughly $4.99 to $9.99 per week as of September 2026, with no one-off purchase. For a single afternoon's work on a handful of family photos, one week is cheap; the problem is that the week renews, and Remini's Trustpilot rating of around 1.4 out of 5 is dominated by reviews about renewals people could not cancel. If you go this route, cancel on the day you subscribe and let the week run out.

Genealogy bundles

MyHeritage includes photo tools in its genealogy plans, about $119 to $299 per year as of September 2026. The photo tools are not sold separately. It became famous for animating faces, with seventy-two million animations in its first five weeks, and if you are already building a family tree there, the photo features come along for nothing extra. If you only want the photos, you are paying for the tree.

One-payment packs

Revive is the one-payment option. Mini is $9 for up to three photos with 2K files for screens. Family archive is $19 for up to ten photos with 4K masters, 300 dpi print files for 30×40 cm and a reveal video. Heirloom is $39 for ten photos with 8K masters, print files for 30×40 and 50×70 cm and one four-second animation. There is no account and nothing that renews. You see a free preview of your own photo before paying, redos are free and unlimited for fourteen days, and the refund is full even after you have downloaded the files.

The side-by-side

The table below puts the three software options next to each other on the things that decide the real cost: what you pay, whether it stops, and what you can do if the result is wrong. Hand retouching is left out because it is priced per job and cannot be summarised fairly in a row.

What the real cost is

The real cost is rarely the sticker. It is a subscription you forgot, a result that changed your grandmother's face with no way to send it back, or a plan you bought for one feature. Work out how many photos you have, whether you want prints, and how many times you might want to try again. For most families with a shoebox of ten to thirty photos, one or two packs at $19 is the whole bill, and if it does not look like them, it is nothing.