10 damage types
Whatever happened to it, start here
Describe what you are holding and the wall will route you. Every page says what the damage is, what a repair can and cannot do about it, and which photograph we used to find out.
Before
What came backOne photograph, one control, and a different horse
The wall set out to take a single damaged print through the app twice, so a reader could see what each control is for rather than read a feature list. The Enhance half of that test is on the faded and darkened page and it worked. This is the Restore half.
Restore replaced an 1880 cabinet card of an army horse with a modern colour photograph of a palomino in a modern saddle, on modern grass, in modern light. Nothing of the original survives except the pose. Run the same card through Enhance, on the faded and darkened page, and the result is a genuine improvement to the actual photograph. That is the whole lesson of this wall in two frames: Enhance works on the photograph you have, Restore draws a new one that resembles it, and on a family photograph the difference matters more than the finish does.
- Source
- Colonel, a Union horse who survived 18 battles, about 1880
- Holder and licence
- Library of Congress, LCCN 2015650837, no known restrictions
- Control used
- Restore
- Model it called
- flux-kontext-apps/restore-image on Replicate
- Elapsed
- 5.0 seconds
- Output size
- 1248 x 832 px
- Captured
- 17 Sep 2026
What restoration cannot fix
Honesty matters more than magic. This plate is from the same collection as every repair above, and its face is gone: a century of abrasion removed the image layer itself. Restoration rebuilds from surviving detail, and here nothing survived to build from. A model could invent a face, but it would be an invention, not your relative. When damage crosses that line we say so, and this photograph is where the line is.
Every photograph behind this wall, named
Runs made and published: 10 of 10 pages, on 17 Sep 2026, with the exact models the app calls. 6 of them came back as a repair and 4 came back wrong, and the wrong ones are on their pages with the invented part named. Sources staged and licence checked: 10 of 10. A claim on this site is meant to be checkable, so here is the list to check it against.
| Damage | Photograph staged | Holder | Licence | Control | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scratches | Ada Stoddard, 1914 | Wikimedia Commons | public domain, copyright expired | Restore | A miss, published |
| Water and ring stains | US Marine Corps record photograph 127-GW-304-110873 | US National Archives | public domain, United States government record | Restore | A repair |
| Mould spots | Chalet de Trutat, Foix | Wikimedia Commons | no known copyright restrictions | Restore | A repair |
| Dark stains | US Marine Corps record photograph 127-GW-319-112715 | US National Archives | public domain, United States government record | Restore | A repair |
| Fading and darkening | Colonel, a Union horse who survived 18 battles, about 1880 | Library of Congress, LCCN 2015650837 | no known restrictions | Enhance | A repair |
| Dirt and grime | Archives cantonales jurassiennes, 137 J 1130 | Wikimedia Commons | public domain | Enhance | A repair |
| Deterioration and mottling | 33rd Battalion unit photograph, about 1915 | Wikimedia Commons | public domain, copyright expired | Restore | A miss, published |
| Tears and missing corners | Airplane, 1912, Digital Public Library of America | Wikimedia Commons | public domain | Restore | A miss, published |
| Blur and soft focus | Betty Stoddard, 1919 | Wikimedia Commons | public domain, copyright expired | Enhance | A miss, published |
| Damaged faces | Dandridge McRae in prewar militia uniform, about 1860 | Prairie Grove Battlefield State Park, via Wikimedia Commons | public domain, copyright expired | Restore | A repair |
Your shoebox has one of these in it
Scratches, stains, fading: every family collection carries them. Find the damage, read what a repair can honestly do to it, then decide.
