This was an incredible ride. Lots of fails, lots of fine-tuning, countless days spent working, but in the end it was all worth it.
Before telling you about this story,** I need to share something about my family and the idea that sparked this insane project.**
How and where it all started
I was born in 1999 (in 🇮🇹 Bari, Italy), and growing up my generation was lucky enough to experience the "good side" of the modern world, such as photography.
What once required expensive equipment and processing now lived in our pockets, forever transforming how we see, capture, and remember.
It wasn't the same for my family. For them, professional photography was often a luxury they couldn't afford. As a result, they were left with 1000's of damaged photos, blurred childhood pictures, wedding pictures that were taken by family members instead of professional photographers - and photo albums full of photos you could barely see.
Decades of memories were barely visible - wedding photos where you couldn't see faces, childhood pictures that looked like watercolor smudges, family gatherings reduced to shadows. However, some of the photos were originally REALLY good. But time got the best of them.
Out of the many family photos, most of them were simply low-resolution and too small for today's screens. Many of these photos were so small, faded and/or damaged that you could barely see the faces.
So I decided to do something about it.
I started digging into old family albums (despite my dust allergy), went through _THOUSANDS _of family photos and spent a few days digitalizing them one by one. By the end of the third day, I had over 500 photos.
Some of the photos had water stains, tears, fading, scratches, dust. Others were just old. I've selected around 150 photos that I wanted to restore, bring back to life, and show to my grandmother. I've also asked friends and family members to send me their old photos, and began experimenting.
One of my absolute favorite photos is the one below:
The endless search for the perfect AI photo restoration model
I began digging into existing AI models and tools, then learned about ML, vibe-coding, SaaS, startups and other topics that were unfamiliar to me until an year ago.
Started learning about training datasets.
Turns out existing AI models learn from perfect photos - _not _1960s Italian family snapshots with coffee stains and tears that were stored inside an old luggage.
Using a model that was trained and fine-tuned on all kinds of photos (ranging from historical images to dusty family portraits from the 90's), I started seeing the first successful photo restorations.
My hopes were up, but little did I know this was just the beginning.
The results were not good enough. The faces were not always being preserved, some details remained lost, AI artifacts often appeared ruining the photos.
Occasionally, AI kept creating mustaches and gave my 5-year-old uncle the face of a 40-year-old. 🥸
AI just wasn't ready for image restoration
Before training and fine-tuning the final model, I've tried countless tools, experimented with models and prompts. Mostly with no success.
This is one of my many failed attempts at AI photo restoration:
It sounds funny now, but back then… it wasn't.
So I kept on fine-tuning, testing and fine-tuning. After a month, the results of the photo restorations were similar and comparable to publicly available tools such as ChatGPT*, and better than existing models specifically made for photo restoration such as GFPGAN, Ddcolor and Codeformer.
*For those who don't know: you can upload a photo on ChatGPT and ask it to restore the provided image, preserving faces, details and such. But the result won't be satisfying. In fact, it will probably be creepy.
AI photo restoration needed to be better. It needed to be something I could proudly show to my family, and perhaps the world. And so it became better. In fact, it became so good that I considered selling it as a service on Reddit communities like r/estoration - but then I had a better idea.
Pinin - a dead-simple but extremely advanced AI image restoration and photo enhancement tool that could be used by everyone - even your grandma. Not made for profit - a tool made for people, to bring their memories, their families and their history back to life.
Turning the idea into reality
I took a break from all AI models, the endless research and all the fine-tuning when I was accepted into the Lovable Shipped competition. A few months earlier, I've pitched my idea and applied for this no-code competition.
Amongst the prizes for the competition, there were $100k in cash and a live pitch in front of investors plus a flight to San Francisco. It was an opportunity I couldn't miss.
The competition was the perfect reason to stop waiting for the right moment, and to just execute. With my unhealthy perfectionism set aside, I began working on Pinin. The ultimate goal was to turn this personal project into something that could actually transform other people's lives.
For the following 6 weeks, I've worked non-stop on the branding, the models and the website (both front-end and back-end) all by myself, with no team, no AI specialists and no external developers.
Every week, I've worked on the competition's weekly assignment on top of the assignments of my roadmap, documented the progress and submitted an update containing all the news, along with all the proofs. Every single week for six weeks.
After a month and a half, all the bells and whistles were there: legal pages, referral program, GDPR-compliance, magic link auth system for reduced friction and lots of under-the-hood optimizations. I've recorded and edited the final video pitch for investors, submitted it and crossed my fingers.
Pinin was ready for launch. I was ready.
The product validation (from my grandmother)
Once the tool was ready, showing it to my family was the biggest satisfaction. We literally took a picture of an old family photo with a phone. Within 20 seconds, it was as if the photo was taken yesterday.
Then, I pulled out the 150 restored photos that were collected months earlier.
When I showed my grandmother the restored photos, she went silent. Then she started crying. She pointed at her mother in a 50's family portrait and said, "She's beautiful. I forgot she was so beautiful."
This was the moment that made it all worth it. Building something that makes people happy. Something that made my grandma happy, and potentially something that made other grandmothers around the world happy as well.
📌 Long story short: I didn't win the competition. I didn't even make it to the top 50. I didn't get any prize and I didn't get to pitch the project to investors. But I did finish the website, it was now fully working and presentable. And most importantly, my grandma loved it.
That's when Pinin.ai was officially born.
Memories hit different when you see them with clarity
This technical challenge turned into something unexpectedly emotional.** Turns out family memories feel different when you can actually see them clearly.**
Every family has a photo box (or luggage, like in my case) somewhere. Photos that should be displayed but aren't because you can barely make out the faces. Wedding pictures that look more like abstract art. Baby photos that could be anyone's baby.
Pinin.ai turns that photo box into a treasure chest. It makes the past present again.
In an age where we take a thousand photos a week on our phones, Pinin reminds us that the most precious images are often the ones we can barely see. Until now.
It's very important to note that damaged photos aren't just "low quality" images - they're archaeological records. Each type of damage tells a story about where the photo has been and what happened to it.
Old cameras had specific optical characteristics - particular types of blur, depth of field patterns, grain structures.
The purpose of Pinin is not to replace old family photos with AI-generated pictures. The purpose of Pinin is to bring photos back to life. With all their quirks and all their history - with a better quality, clarity and resolution.
What is Pinin exactly? And what does it do?
Pinin is a state-of-the-art image restoration tool that leverages the latest AI models and technologies to bring photos back to life.
It can colorize, deblur, remove dust & scratches, upscale and much more.
Remember the photo you've seen earlier? Below you can see it restored and colorized by Pinin.
Pinin is extremely easy to use. With the magic link login, you only need an email address to try it out.
Drag and drop your photos, click the button and watch the magic happen. It's that simple.
Just upload a photo and watch decades disappear.
One of the main goals was to reduce friction, allowing everyone to quickly and accurately restore their photos _without _paying for manual restoration services that can cost hundreds of dollars.
Professional photo restoration can cost $30–200 per image. For the 200+ damaged photos sitting in most family archives, that's choosing between preserving memories and paying rent.
Pinin flips this equation: starting from $0.70 per restoration. One photo costs less than your morning coffee. An entire family archive costs less than dinner out.
🔗 **[Try Pinin.ai's photo restoration
](https://www.pinin.ai/photo-restoration)**
Why "Pinin"?
The name 'Pinin' was inspired by Giuseppina "Pinin" Brambilla Barcilon, a famous art restorer known for spending over 20 years restoring the Last Supper of Leonardo Da Vinci.
Pinin.ai aims to carry forward Giuseppina's values by meticulously analyzing damage and faithfully restoring photos in a way that existing tools can't.
Although Pinin may not have the same patience (or wait times - photos are typically processed in 12 seconds on average) or eye for detail that Giuseppina had, it also doesn't come with the costs normally involved with manual photo restoration.
Nowadays, there are advanced tools and software that allow photo editors to accurately restore photos, but they require a lot of manual work - which usually comes with a bill.
🔗 Learn more about Pinin's story
Faithful AI photo restoration for everyone
The accuracy of Pinin surpasses industry leaders like ChatGPT, and even models that were specifically trained on restoring photos such as Codeformer, ddcolor or GFPGAN.
While other models either do not restore the damage and/or create unwanted artifacts, AI faces and other issues that arise with the use of AI for standard photo generation, Pinin focuses on maintaining the original details and face features.
Most AI models were trained on pristine images, so when they see damage, they hallucinate details instead of intelligently reconstructing them.
Below you can find a comparison of Pinin with other AI tools:
Visit https://pinin.ai/examples for the full-resolution comparison and more examplesWith the right prompting, ChatGPT can do wonders. But it's not ready for image restoration. It was not _trained _for image restoration.
The models used by Pinin were trained on hundreds of old photos from all around the world. This allows Pinin to carefully and faithfully restore lost details, faces, words, and even animals.
🔗 See what Pinin can do (and how it compares with other tools)
Don't wait. Restore your history today.
As a limited time offer, Pinin is offering one free credit to all new accounts. All you need to do is enter your email address - no password and no credit card required.
There's even a money-back guarantee if a photo can't be saved. For those with photos that are particularly difficult to restore and can not be restored by AI, we also offer a manual photo restoration service starting from only $20 per photo.
If you are fully happy with Pinin (and you want to share your restored photos with the world), you can also submit photos restored with Pinin on the photo wall for a chance to get $10 worth of free credits.
Did I already say it's free to try?
That's true - the first photo restoration is 100% free. No questions asked. No credit card required. Just visit the website, login and restore your first photo.
Visit https://pinin.ai/restore to try out Pinin's photo restoration service
Get your first free photo restoration
TL;DR
I wanted to restore my grandma's old family photos, so I built an AI tool that can accurately restore images and then turned it into a SaaS. And yes, my grandma loved it.
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