Reimagine App uses AI to update outdated photographs

Reimagine is a new smartphone app from online genealogical resource MyHeritage that promises to animate and colorize old pictures to give them new life. Starting with a multi-page scanner that allows users to scan whole physical album pages at once, the app delivers a buffet of functions. The photographs are saved locally to an album and to MyHeritage's cloud service after being scanned by the underlying AI, which also performs automatic face detection and frame cropping.

According to MyHeritage, the goal of the app is to enable users to "preserve, improve, and share family photos" within a single app without having to shell out a ton of money for those services. Currently, the Reimagine app has four main controls. Black and white or fading photos can be given a splash of color with the Colorize function.The skin texture sharpness and strong denoising of the results appear a little choppy, but the colors look great.

The Enhance tool, which does resolution upscaling and sharpening to highlight more details, comes in second. If the scanned images have scratches, it also fixes the scratches and restores faded colors. From the samples shared by MyHeritage, it appears that the AI does its job fairly well, but it is arguably nowhere close to the generative AI fill tools that were recently announced by Adobe.

Animate, which takes a quick live photo of a person's face, is the most ambitious function in Reimagine's kitty. It conducts a modest motion modification to the lips, moves the head, and adds pupil movement to make them appear more realistic. Although this one is a little unsettling, numerous apps and online resources already use a similar method. Reimagine accomplishes this without using any technological procedures, and it subsequently uploads all of the photographs to its own unique user directory on the MyHeritage website.

For the sake of ethical transparency, all AI-enhanced images receive a unique badge in the bottom-left corner for simple identification. This badge may be a bandage (pixel repair), magic wand (enhancing), moving ball (photo animation), or color palette (picture colorization). Notably, the altered copies of the photos are saved as distinct files while the original photo scans are left untouched and saved in the cloud.

There are plans for further functionality including enhanced sharing and photo tagging. The software currently supports 11 languages, and there are plans to add more in the future, but it only provides a certain number of free tokens for photo editing. Following that, you will need to pay money for the monthly or yearly subscriptions that provide limitless scanning and photo editing. The cost of the monthly subscription tier is $7.99, while the yearly plan, which includes a seven-day free trial, costs $49.99.