A colorized photo of your grandmother isn’t a crime against history.
You’d never know it from the way some people talk. Restore an old family photo with AI, post it proudly, and you can expect a crowd to tell you that you’ve faked your ancestors, insulted the photographer and polluted the record. Some of them will call the picture slop. Some will call you a fool. A few will say it should be banned outright.
This argument has been running in writing groups for a while, and now it’s arrived in genealogy. My take is the same one I have on AI Derangement Syndrome in general: the worry is mostly overblown, and the way people treat each other over it is worse than anything the tool has done.
Why do people get so angry about AI-restored family photos?
Because the photos matter to them. Old family pictures are some of the most personal things people own, and genealogists treat them as records. When software changes a face, it feels like somebody tampered with a grave.
A thread I read this week in a genealogy group shows both sides. The original post was thoughtful. The author worried that AI-enhanced images were creeping into family trees and being treated as evidence, and he asked the big genealogy companies to build tools and policies to deal with it. Fair enough.
Then the comments arrived. Restored photos got called AI slop. People who enjoy them were mocked as the “oooh it brings them to life” brigade. Someone compared liking a colorized photo to falling for the Emperor’s New Clothes. Another wanted colorization banned, period.
Meanwhile, a woman in the same thread explained that she’d only ever seen three photos of her grandfather, who was killed in World War II. Who exactly is served by sneering at people like her?
Hollywood already fought this war over colorized movies
Anybody old enough remembers the colorization fight of the 1980s.
Ted Turner bought MGM’s film library in 1985 and started colorizing black and white classics. Hollywood went to war. Jimmy Stewart sent Congress a letter in 1987 protesting the colorized version of It’s a Wonderful Life, comparing it to dunking the film in Easter egg dye. Directors lined up against it.
Roger Ebert called the colorized Casablanca one of the saddest days in the history of the movies. Turner’s answer was that the last time he checked, he owned the films.
It ended without much drama. Congress passed the National Film Preservation Act of 1988. It set up the National Film Registry and required labels on colorized or materially altered versions of films on it. Audiences tried the colorized versions, and most of them drifted back to the originals. The colorization companies went under. Turner himself launched Turner Classic Movies in 1994, a channel that shows the films in their original black and white. Nobody went to jail. Nobody’s grandmother was erased.
So why are we fighting the same war again over family snapshots?
Thirty years later, Peter Jackson restored and colorized World War I footage for They Shall Not Grow Old, and critics praised it for making the soldiers look like real young men instead of jerky gray ghosts. It was the same technique, used with care.
A colorized photo of your grandmother isn’t a crime against history. – Richard LoweShare on X
Where the genealogists have a fair point
Evidence. A genealogy record is supposed to show what was there, and an AI that rebuilds a blurry face from guesswork creates something that wasn’t. If an enhanced photo gets passed around a family tree site as the original, a researcher down the line might trust a nose the software invented. That’s a real problem, and the people raising it have a case.
The fix was already in the thread. Keep the original. Label the restored copy. On a genealogy site or in an archive, post the original next to the restored version, or post only the original. MyHeritage puts a small icon on enhanced and colorized photos and keeps the original untouched. So it can be done. I wrote a practical guide to restoring old photos for a book that covers how I handle it.
That’s a labeling problem with a labeling solution. It doesn’t require calling anyone names.
Was the original old photo ever accurate?
Less than the purists think.
One commenter in that thread made the point well: the image most people call the original is a digital scan of a faded print, made from a negative, shot through an old lens by a photographer who may have retouched it before it ever left the studio. Every step changed something. Movement blurred faces, and decades of chemistry shifted the colors. Even scanning a print alters it, because the scanner makes its own choices about color and sharpness.
None of that makes the original worthless. It’s the best record you’ve got, so you keep it. But the belief that any change at all is a sin falls apart the moment you look at how photographs were made. Restoration has always been part of the process. The argument is about how much, and whether you say so.
Say so, and most of the problem goes away.
Is restoring a family photo with AI wrong?
No. I had about 10,000 of my own family photos scanned, and the ones with bad damage got the extra enhancement every time, because they made better pictures. The originals are still there. Anybody who wants to see the cracks can look at the cracks.
Photo retouching is older than any of us. Darkroom photographers dodged, burned and painted out blemishes for a century. Studios hand-colored portraits from the 1840s on, and plenty of family prints still carry the tinting instructions on the back. Your great-aunt’s studio portrait, the one everybody treats as the original, was retouched before you were born. The AI version is the same impulse with a faster brush.
A colorized photo is an interpretation. Labeled, it’s honest. Most people sharing one with their cousins aren’t trying to fool a future genealogist. They want to see Grandpa the way he looked to the people who loved him.
What the photo police get wrong
They confuse a disagreement about records with a license to sneer.
Someone who calls a stranger’s restored photo slop adds nothing to the historical record except contempt. Anyone who mocks people for saying a colorized picture “brings them to life” is mocking grief, because that’s usually what’s behind it: somebody who lost a parent or grandparent and wants one more clear look at a face.
A demand to ban the whole practice because some people do it badly is the same move the anti-AI crowd makes everywhere, from “post an AI image and unfriend me” to the people who called a woman a thief over a bedtime story.
Would any of them say it to her face, across a kitchen table, while she held the only photo of her grandfather? I doubt it. A screen makes people meaner than they are, and a cause makes them feel righteous about it.
Who appointed them the photo police, anyway?
Your great-aunt’s studio portrait, the one everybody treats as the original, was retouched before you were born.
The beginners pay for the pile-on. Someone new to family history posts the first photo she’s ever restored, gets a dozen replies calling it fake and stupid, and stops posting. Her photos go back in a shoebox, nobody sees them, and nobody asks her what she knows about the people in them. The group loses a member and the family history loses a keeper. That’s a lousy trade for the satisfaction of being right in a comment section.
If you run a genealogy group, set a rule. Require that altered photos be labeled, or ban them from the group’s files if you want. That’s your call to make. What you shouldn’t allow is members tearing into each other for using a tool to see their own families more clearly.
My take
Label the copy, keep the original, and the argument’s over. Hollywood fought this exact war over colorized movies, and the originals survived. The genealogists are right about evidence and wrong about the woman who wants to see her grandfather’s face. Pile-ons cost the hobby its beginners, and they put their photos back in a shoebox and stop posting. Group admins can require labels and leave it there. Restore Grandma’s photo if you want to see her face, and let the beginners post.
What should you do if people attack your restored photo?
Say what you did and keep the original. “This is AI-restored from a damaged print; I’ve kept the original scan” answers every honest question anyone could ask. If they keep going, they weren’t asking honest questions, and you don’t owe them a debate.
Then enjoy the picture.
You wanted to see your grandmother’s face clearly, maybe for the first time since you were a kid, and now you can. Print it, frame it, or put it in the family history book you’ve been meaning to write. Put the original scan in a safe folder with a clear name so nobody ever has to wonder which version came first. Then let the people who want to argue about it argue with each other, because you’ve already done everything an honest person could ask.
For more on why AI makes otherwise reasonable people lose their minds, see the AI and writing hub. If you’re turning a family’s photos and stories into a book, my memoir ghostwriting process shows how I work. Label the copy, keep the original, and let the photo police yell at someone else.
People restoring their family photos are using AI the way I describe in The Birth of the Augmented Human, as a tool that adds to what a person can do.
