We all love looking at old black and white family photos for a trip down memory lane. But imagine seeing a photo of your great-grandmother with her vibrant red hair and piercing blue eyes. Now that’s possible with Ancestry's new colorization feature. You can bring your ancestors to life with color-enhanced images that you can easily share with family. 

More Ways to Restore 

Ancestry already enables you to capture, digitize, retouch and preserve old family photos and now, we’re introducing a new feature to enhance images through a colorization tool. You can colorize black and white photos, gaining a more vivid, real-life snapshot of your ancestors and their lives. 

“The popularity of image enhancement and sharing continues so we've invested in even more tools to make this easier for our community,” said Crista Cowan, Corporate Genealogist at Ancestry. “Over the past two months we've seen over 29 million image uploads - and with each image uploaded, our community has the opportunity to engage and uncover new discoveries and share with dozens of family members around the world."

With our partnership with media preservation and archiving specialist company Photomyne, the suite of image enhancement tools now available to Ancestry users will give you even more ways to make family history discoveries and bring them to life through image enhancement. 

“This technology is a game changer for anyone who has family photos they want to enhance,” said Connie Knox of Genealogy TV and Ancestry user. “Previously, I used several third party apps to upload, scan, crop and colorize but with these new features on Ancestry, adding images to my family tree, sharing and enhancing is so much easier and faster–allowing me to make even more family history discoveries.” 

How To Use

To use the colorization feature on mobile, simply click into an image and tap ‘Edit’. On the Ancestry website, click the wrench icon and then ‘Edit Photo’. Using the multicolored ‘Colorize’ icon, you can see the colorized photo in comparison to the original. Even after you save the original, you can always revert back to the original–so you never have to worry about losing the original image. 

Colorization in action

Share Your Photos Today 

All Ancestry members can now upload individual images or photo albums previously added to their Ancestry account. You can then apply auto-cropping on scanned images, rotate on your mobile device, and colorize your images using these new photo enhancements on your own family trees or any you collaborate on. The colorization feature is available on both the Ancestry website and mobile app starting today.. 

Join the conversation and share your images and family history discoveries using #MyAncestryStory on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook and follow Ancestry on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok.