// the find
Nutlope/restorePhotos
Restoring old and blurry face photos with AI.
A Next.js wrapper around Replicate's hosted GFPGAN model that restores degraded face photos. You upload a photo, it runs through Tencent's face restoration model via API, and returns the enhanced version. Aimed at people who want a quick hosted tool, not developers building restoration pipelines.
- Dead simple architecture — one API route calls Replicate, stores to Bytescale, done. Easy to read and understand in an afternoon.
- GFPGAN is a genuinely good model for face restoration; the quality of results on old photos is legitimately impressive.
- Includes rate limiting via Upstash Redis and NSFW checking, which are the two things you'd actually need before opening this to the public.
- One-click Vercel deploy works, and the env var setup is minimal for a project with this many external dependencies.
- The local dev setup is broken by design — the README literally tells you to clone an older commit if you want to run it locally, because auth was added and the docs were never updated.
- Every meaningful capability is outsourced: Replicate runs the model, Bytescale stores images, Neon hosts the DB. If any of those services change pricing or APIs, the app breaks. You own almost nothing.
- Last commit was June 2024 and there's no indication of active maintenance. GFPGAN itself hasn't been updated since 2022, so the underlying model quality is frozen.
- No batch processing, no support for non-face photos, no configurable model parameters — you get exactly one slider (the compare view) and that's it.