Photo and Audio Tools for Family History

1. Get the scans into a format the browser can open

Scanners and photo apps produce a wider range of files than a browser can read. Image Converter handles JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF and GIF and writes JPG, PNG, WebP or AVIF, so a mixed folder can be normalised into one format before anything else. Keep the full resolution: this step is about compatibility, not about saving space.

Two formats stop the chain at the door. TIFF, which many flatbed scanners produce by default, cannot be opened, so export it as PNG or JPG from the scanning software. HEIC from a phone cannot be opened either, and no tool on this site decodes it. Do that conversion in the camera app or the system photo app, then come back. Nothing is uploaded in this step.

2. Restore the worst prints

AI Image Enhancer is the strongest option and the only step on this page that uploads. Three models match three levels of damage: Standard costs 1 credit, is fastest and always returns PNG; Professional costs 6 and keeps the original format; Advanced costs 40 and rebuilds heavily degraded photos. The mode matters as much as the model, because Fidelity first holds on to detail that already exists, while Texture first invents plausible texture.

For family photographs, Fidelity first is the safer default. A face is exactly the kind of subject where invented detail looks wrong, and an advanced texture pass can turn a familiar expression into a stranger's. Enlargement goes up to 4x, with an output cap of 6144 px on Standard and 10240 px on the other two. Guests get one free run a day, a free account gets 5 credits daily, and batch size is one image as a guest, three on Free and ten on Pro.

3. Upscale the rest without uploading

Not every photo needs the cloud. AI Image Upscaler runs an ESRGAN model of about one megabyte on your own graphics card and offers 2x, 4x, 6x or 8x, with 2x and 4x in one pass and 6x and 8x chaining two passes, with up to 20 images per batch. It cleans compression artifacts and rebuilds edge contrast, which is enough for a print that is merely soft or slightly blocky, and nothing leaves the machine.

The honest limit is that upscaling is not restoration. If the scan does not contain the detail, a bigger file will look cleaner but not more detailed, and a blurred face stays a blurred face. Output is capped at 8192 px on the long edge and 24 megapixels in total. For a photo that is badly torn, scratched or faded, no tool here repairs the damage; a dedicated retouching job is the only real answer.

4. Compress and strip metadata before sharing

A full-resolution gallery is fine for the archive and painful to send. Image Compressor takes the whole set, shrinks it with a quality slider and can resize by percentage, with a live before and after preview. WebP and AVIF give the smallest files for a family group chat, while JPEG remains the format that opens on everything.

Then remove what the camera recorded. Remove EXIF strips EXIF, XMP, IPTC and comments from JPEG and PNG without re-encoding the pixels, and it shows GPS coordinates before you commit. That matters when a photo was taken at a family home. Two limits: only JPEG and PNG are supported, and stripping metadata is not blurring, so a house number visible in the picture is still visible.

5. Build the archive PDF

Image to PDF turns the prepared photos into pages. Drag the cards into the order the album should read, choose A4 or Letter, portrait or landscape, a margin, and whether each image fits inside the page or fills it. Contain keeps a portrait whole, while Cover fills the sheet and trims the edges. There is no fixed image count, but every page is held in memory, so a large album is more reliable in a few volumes.

If the PDF is going to be printed and bound, Add Page Numbers stamps a number in one of six positions, with a starting number, four formats and an option to skip the cover. The page numbers are drawn as text, so they stay selectable. If the file is still too heavy to email, Compress PDF rewrites the structure, but it does not re-encode the images, so the gain on photos is modest. Compress the images first, then build the PDF.

6. Record the stories while you still can

Photographs carry names and dates, and the voice is what fills in everything else. Voice Recorder captures an interview in the browser with no time limit and no watermark, and nothing is uploaded; the file is WebM, OGG or M4A depending on the browser, and it can be converted to MP3 before download. Choose the input device first if the default microphone is the wrong one, and record in a quiet room rather than trying to fix the audio later.

Audio Trimmer then cuts the recording into a few usable pieces, with a fade of up to 5 seconds at each end and either MP3 or WAV as output. Store the clips next to the PDF, named by the person and the year. Transcription is optional and is the one part that would upload: Video to Subtitles sends the file to a server and recognises Simplified Chinese and English only, so a private interview is better kept as audio unless the speaker agrees.

What this chain cannot do

• No colourisation. Nothing here adds colour to a black and white photograph.
• No damage repair. Tears, scratches, stains and missing corners are not reconstructed. Enhancement sharpens and cleans; it does not rebuild a torn print.
• Upscaling is not restoration. A bigger file does not contain detail the scan never had.
• No TIFF and no HEIC. Both have to be converted in the scanner or camera app before they enter this chain.
• Handwriting is not reliable. Printed OCR covers eleven languages, but pen and pencil come back as fragments.
• Enhancement uploads and costs credits. Standard is 1 credit, Professional 6 and Advanced 40, and the result is held on a server for 30 minutes.
• Transcription uploads too. Video to Subtitles is not a private transcript, and it covers Simplified Chinese and English only.
• No designed album. The PDF has one photo per page, without captions, borders or decorative layouts.

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