This runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
About Colorize photo
Adds colour to a grayscale still in the browser. A same-origin colorization ONNX runs when the weights are present; otherwise a cheap Lab heuristic so the page is not a lie. Nothing is uploaded.
Old photo colourisers on the web are usually a GPU farm and a waitlist. I wanted a page that never takes the scan. If colorize.onnx is on this origin and the tensor layout matches, that net paints chroma. If the file is missing — DeOldify-class weights are huge, and I will not pull them from a CDN — the page applies a local warm/cool heuristic and says so. I would rather a modest result than a fake 'AI restore' badge.
Neither path knows that the coat was green. Neural colourisation invents a plausible world. The heuristic invents even less: a tint from luminance. Family history is not a place to be slick. Look at the download before you print it.
Same loader as background removal: onnxruntime-web wasm from /ort, model from /models, CacheFirst, no connect-src to model hosts. The CSP already forbids that. If a future model is too big for the PWA cache, it still loads on demand from this origin, not from theirs.
How to use Colorize photo
- 1Drop a grayscale or faded scan.
- 2Click Colorize. Wait — CPU, not an upload.
- 3Download the PNG and decide if the guess is usable.
What it won't do
- Guesses chroma. Never ground truth.
- May use a cheap tint if the ONNX is absent or mismatched.
- Not DeOldify, on purpose.
Common questions
Does colorize upload the photograph?
No. Weights, if present, are on this origin. The scan stays in memory.
Is this DeOldify?
No. Full DeOldify is far too large to self-host next to a static site without a CDN. If a compact ONNX is here, it runs. If not, you get the heuristic and this FAQ, not a watermarked third-party API.
Will it guess the original colours correctly?
It cannot know. Treat it as a sketch. If you have a living relative who remembers the wallpaper, ask them, not a 256-pixel net.
Why ship a heuristic at all?
So the workbench is not a 404 when the optional weights did not download in this environment. The UI is still a colouriser. It is not advertised as a museum-grade restore.
Related tools
Why this one doesn't upload your file
There is no server to upload to. This page is a static file, and the work happens in your browser using the same graphics and WebAssembly code that renders every other site you visit. Your file is read from disk into memory, processed, and handed back as a download. Once the page has loaded you can disconnect from the network entirely and it keeps working. The longer explanation