Restoring old photos
without uploading them.

What you are handing over

When you upload a photograph to an online restorer, you are not just sending pixels. You are usually granting a licence, creating a copy on infrastructure you do not control, and adding a picture of identifiable people — often children, often people who have died — to a database that will outlive your interest in it.

None of that is necessarily sinister. It is simply the deal, and it is worth reading the deal before you accept it for the photographs you cannot replace.

Four things to check in anyone’s terms

These are the clauses that actually determine what happens to your photograph. They are usually all present, and usually all findable in about five minutes.

• The licence grant. Look for what rights you give the service over your image. “Worldwide, royalty-free, sub-licensable” is broad, and broad is normal — but it means the picture can be used in ways you did not specifically agree to.
• Training use. Some services reserve the right to improve their models using uploaded images. Look for whether that is opt-in, opt-out, or simply assumed, and whether opting out is available on the free tier.
• Retention. “Deleted immediately” and “deleted from active systems within 30 days” are very different promises, and backups are usually excluded from both.
• Sub-processors. Most services run on somebody else’s cloud and use somebody else’s model. Each hop is another copy and another set of terms.

Why on-device work is different

Revelo does its restoration on your own Mac. The models ship inside the app, they run on your machine’s own silicon, and the app has no network permission at all — not throttled, not optional, not off by default. There is no upload step to read the terms of, because there is no upload.

The practical consequence is that the questions above stop applying. There is no licence to grant, no retention period, no sub-processor, and no account. Your photographs sit in a folder on your Mac before and after, and the restored files are ordinary images you can open in anything.

BeforeAfter Revelo↔A young woman in a paisley blouse resting her cheek on her hand, photographed in the 1970s — drag to reveal more of the restored version

The honest trade-offs

Running locally is not free of cost, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

• It needs a capable machine. Revelo is built for Apple Silicon. A data centre will always have more hardware to throw at the problem than a laptop does.
• It is not instant. A detailed restoration takes seconds to a minute or so per photograph rather than appearing the moment you drop it in a browser.
• There is no phone app and no sync. Your library lives on one machine, which is the point, but it does mean you are responsible for backing it up.

For a photograph you could retake tomorrow, none of that is worth it. For the box in the loft, most people decide it is.