About this page and the decisions behind it

RepairImage does one job in two halves. On a scan of a damaged print it finds the dust, specks and hairline scratches, lets you correct what it found, closes them from the picture around them, and pulls the range back out of a photograph that has faded. On a photo file that will not open it walks the file’s structure, names the byte where it broke, and saves the original bytes that survive. It is not a photo editor with a repair feature. There is no account, no gallery, no project file and nothing to subscribe to. It is built and kept by a small independent team.

Three decisions worth explaining

The mask comes before the repair

Most tools in this category go straight from a file to a result, and the result is a photograph that has been altered in ways nobody can enumerate. The single irreversible judgement in restoration is deciding which pixels are damage, and that judgement depends entirely on what the photograph is of — a detector cannot know that a thin dark line is a mooring rope rather than a scratch. So the marks are drawn first, over an untouched picture, and two brushes let you argue with them. It is slower. It is the only version of this that can be checked.

The work happens on your machine

Photographs that arrive here are usually the only copy of something. Sending them to a server would mean asking for that trust, holding the file somewhere, and being a party to it in a way that a page which does the arithmetic locally simply is not. The detection, the fill and the tone curves are written in TypeScript and run in a background thread in your browser. There is no upload step because there is nothing to upload to.

It refuses a good deal of work

Silvering and mould are named as unrecoverable, colour is never added to a monochrome print, and the local fill says plainly that it cannot close a tear. There is now a model that will draw into one, and it is offered the same way: behind a control that names its size, described as invention rather than recovery, and off until somebody asks. Each of those would be easy to fake convincingly enough to satisfy a first glance. A page about damaged photographs that quietly invented a face and called it a repair would be worse than no page at all, so the refusals — and the one thing that is a guess — are written down where somebody can read them before they spend an evening.

What it will not do to a photograph

The repair never adds colour to a monochrome original.
No face is reconstructed from nothing.
Anything a model invents is marked on the picture and counted in the record.
Nothing you open is kept, shared, or used to train anything.

What it costs

Nothing to use. There is no account, subscription or paid tier. There is no advertising on this site.