A dirt-simple, native macOS app that restores old family-photo scans — faded prints, low-res snapshots, soft faces. Drag in a photo or a folder, optionally pick an output folder, and watch each photo restore with a live before/after preview. Everything runs on-device (Apple Silicon, Core ML) — no cloud, no accounts, no data leaves your Mac.

It's a native Swift reimplementation of the photo-restore Python CLI, using the same models converted to Core ML.

• Auto-contrast faded scans (luminance-preserving — never shifts color, never colorizes).
• Upscale with Real-ESRGAN x4plus (optional 2×/3×/4× or fit-to-size), tiled with feathered seams.
• Restore faces with GFPGAN, aligned via Apple Vision, composited back with a parsing mask so only the face is touched. Color-match (B&W stays gray), texture-preserving blend, matched grain.
• Batch 100+ images with live progress, a filmstrip of every image, and a before/after slider.

• PhotoRestore/ — the SwiftUI app (drag-drop, filmstrip, before/after viewer, settings).
• RestoreEngine/ — an internal, SwiftUI-free Swift package: the whole pipeline (image I/O, contrast, tiled upscale, Vision alignment, face restore + paste-back), the Core ML model store, and the serial InferenceEngine + BatchCoordinator. Fully unit-tested (swift test).
• tools/models/ — Python tooling to download + validate the pre-converted Core ML models (see tools/models/VALIDATION.md).

Requires Xcode 16+ and XcodeGen (brew install xcodegen).

xcodegen generate
open PhotoRestore.xcodeproj      # or: xcodebuild -scheme PhotoRestore build
cd RestoreEngine && swift test   # run the engine test suite

The app downloads its ~460 MB of Core ML models on first launch from a hosting bucket (ModelRegistry.baseURL — wire to R2/S3, see tools/models/HOSTING.md). Until that's wired, or for offline use, the app's first-run screen offers Install from Folder… — point it at a folder containing RealESRGAN4x.mlmodel, GFPGAN.mlmodel, FaceParsing.mlmodel (e.g. produced by tools/models/download.py). Each download is SHA-256-verified, compiled to .mlmodelc, and cached in Application Support.

scripts/dmg-local.sh builds an ad-hoc .dmg for local testing. scripts/release.sh builds a Developer-ID-signed, notarized, stapled .dmg — see RELEASE.md for the (Apple-account) prerequisites.

App code: MIT (see LICENSE). The restoration models carry their upstream licenses — Real-ESRGAN (BSD-3), GFPGAN (Apache-2), BiSeNet face-parsing (MIT). (CodeFormer, a non-commercial "balanced" face model, is a deferred future option.)