The shoebox in the closet is the most valuable thing in most houses and the worst looked after. Photograph the prints with your phone and Chestful repairs the damage, adds color to the black-and-white ones, works out roughly when each was taken, and keeps the story attached to the picture.
In development — not yet on the App Store
No scanner, no desktop software, no subscription just to look at your own photographs.
Your phone camera is the scanner. Auto-crop finds the edges of a print and straightens it, so one shot from above at a slight angle comes out square. Batch mode keeps the shutter going so a whole box takes minutes, not an afternoon.
Scratches, creases, tears, and the color shift of forty years in a drawer. Your original is never touched — the repaired copy is stored beside it, and you can go back to the scan you made at any point.
A caption, an estimated era, and tags — suggested, never imposed, and yours to edit. Photograph the back of a print and the handwriting on it is kept with the front as a single item.
A zip of ordinary JPEGs with the captions, dates and names written into each file's own metadata — not stranded in a sidecar file no other app will ever read.
Not a trial, and not free-for-thirty-days. Scan a batch of your own photographs, watch them come back repaired and captioned, and keep them — for as long as you want them. No card needed to start, and nothing disappears if you never pay.
Your first batch of photographs, repaired and captioned, kept for good. Share them with family, export them whenever you like, and try the darkroom styles.
One subscription covers the rest of the shoebox. Cancel it whenever you like and everything you have already scanned stays exactly where it is.
Charge you to look at your own photographs, or to get them back out. Everything you scan can be exported as ordinary files, on the free plan, at any time.
One photograph, before and after. Not a mock-up — this is the output of the same restoration the app runs. The print is a generated sample and the man in it is fictional; the damage is the kind a shoebox actually produces.
The second one is a new file. Your scan is still there, untouched, and always will be.
Most apps give you one slider labeled "enhance" and leave you guessing how much of the result is still your photograph. Chestful splits the catalog in two and labels it, because a sepia print is a treatment of the picture and a frontier restaging is a picture of something that never happened. In a family archive those cannot look like the same button.
Darkroom
The subject stays exactly as photographed — the same people, the same faces, the same framing. Only the rendering changes, the way a different paper or developer would have changed it.
Colorizing a black-and-white photograph is the one most people come for. It is here, and it is in this group because it adds color without restaging anything.
Remix
The same people, reimagined into another setting or another medium. Fun, and plainly fiction — which is exactly why it lives behind its own heading instead of in a list with the darkroom treatments.
Build your own, soon. Pick a scene, an era and a palette and we combine them — hundreds of looks from a few choices, without you ever having to write a prompt or guess the words a machine wants.
Exporting a remix takes an extra confirmation, and the exported file declares itself AI-generated in its own metadata. A hundred years from now nobody should have to guess which of these was real.
The date and the names on the reverse are often the only record of who is in the picture. Chestful pairs both sides as one item rather than leaving you two loose files and no way to tell they belong together.
Most old prints have no date. Record what you actually know — a decade, a year, a full date, or nothing — instead of being forced to invent a day so the sort order works.
Invite by email as a viewer or an editor. Change or remove access whenever you like, and revoking takes effect immediately rather than at their next sign-in.
By person, by caption, by era. Tag a face once and every photograph of them is a tap away — which is the only way a thousand scanned prints stays usable.
Captions, dates and people are written into standard EXIF and IPTC fields, so Photos, Lightroom and every archive tool built in the last twenty years can read what you wrote.
Delete your account from inside the app and everything goes with it — albums, scans, restorations, captions. Immediately and permanently.
The same box usually has film and videotape in it, and nobody has done for those what this does for prints. Super 8 and 8mm that shakes and flickers, VHS that has gone soft and streaky, camcorder tapes nobody can play any more.
Hand-held cine film is the shakiest footage most families own. Steadying it changes how watchable a reel is more than anything else does.
Take out the grain, the dust and the exposure flicker that comes with old film, without turning faces to plastic.
Bring back the color that has drained out of an aging reel — or add it to black-and-white film, the same way we do for prints.