A tad too much colour

Every family has the box. Grandparents at a wedding nobody alive attended, a great-aunt on a bicycle, a street that has since become a car park — all of it grey, most of it creased, some of it torn clean through a face. By autumn 2025 the image models were good enough to put the colour back without swapping in somebody else's face, and that seemed worth a small website.

So: Nano Revive Pix. You photograph the print with your phone, and a few seconds later you get it back upright, repaired and in colour. The name is the model underneath it, Google's Nano Banana. Thirty commits landed on the first day, and it was taking payments six days later.

The hard part is the photo you take of the photo

Almost nobody scans prints any more. What actually arrives is a phone picture of a print lying on a table: slightly rotated, shot at an angle, a white border, a reflection from the ceiling light. The restoration model is very good and still cannot fix what it cannot see.

So before a credit is spent, a second model looks at what you uploaded and gives you two or three plain tips in your own language — straighten it, get a bit closer, your lens looks smudged. It is the cheapest feature in the app, and it works on the right end of the problem: it fixes the input instead of asking the model to guess.

Then one instruction does four jobs in order: turn the picture upright, correct the skew, crop away the border, and only then restore and colourise it — with an explicit demand to keep the exact likeness of every person in it. And one line that has been in the prompt since the first day:

Important: rather add a tad too much color than too little.

It is the right instinct for this particular job. A restoration that is technically careful and slightly too muted reads as fake; one that is a little generous with colour reads as a memory.

What a very small paid product turns out to need

The restoration itself, the photo tips and ten languages were all there on day one. Most of what came after is the part nobody sees and every paid thing needs anyway:

• Payments, a week in: credits, a checkout, and a page that confirms the purchase actually went through before it hands the credits over.
• A reason to pay. In November, free restorations started carrying a watermark and paid ones stopped — and later that month the model underneath was upgraded to Nano Banana Pro, which is the version running now.
• A free tier that survives contact with the internet. Two free photos is generous right up until somebody signs up forty times, so in December signing up over and over stopped being a way to get more.
• Forgetting people on purpose. These are pictures of somebody's family. An account that never bought anything is set up to be deleted after thirty days, its photos along with it, rather than sitting on a disk forever.

The people most likely to own a shoebox of prints are also the least likely to want an English-only website, which is why the interface — and the photo tips — come in ten languages, from Arabic to Japanese.

Ten packs

Ten packs of credits have been sold. That is not a business, and it was never meant to be one. But somebody decided, ten times over, that a photograph of people they cared about was worth five dollars to see in colour — which is a better review than any number of likes.

If you have the box, the first two are free.