Colourise without uploading your photos
Colourising old photos is one of the most personal things people do with software — and, until recently, one that quietly demanded you upload your family history to someone else's servers, often behind a subscription. The photos of grandparents, weddings and childhoods are exactly the images you'd least want sitting in a stranger's cloud.
The old trade-off is gone
Colourisation needs a real neural network, and for years that meant a server, because browsers couldn't run one. That's no longer true. WebAssembly lets a full colourisation model execute inside the tab, on your own processor. This tool downloads the model once (it's sizeable, because it's the real thing), then runs entirely locally — you can add colour to a hundred photos, on a plane, with the network off, and not one of them is transmitted anywhere. No account, no subscription, no upload.
Why it's worth the one-time download
The catch is honest: a genuine model is tens of megabytes, so the first colourisation waits for that download. After that it's cached and instant. That trade — a one-time download in exchange for your photos never leaving your device — is the whole point. A cheaper site would upload your image to skip the download; that's precisely what you don't want for a shoebox of irreplaceable family pictures. Run the model where the photos already live, keep the originals private, and share only the colour versions you choose to.