About
About this site.
Try Pinin is a working manual for the box of family photographs in your house — what to keep, how to store it, what it is worth, and what restoration should cost. It is published by the team behind Pinin, which is disclosed here because you should know who is talking.
The advice we kept giving, but could not fit on a product page.
Pinin is a photo restoration tool. Most people who arrive at it have already made two or three decisions that determined whether restoration would help them at all — and a fair number of them have made the expensive mistake of restoring from a photograph of a photograph, or paid a restorer to fix damage that was really a storage problem.
That advice did not belong on a page selling restoration, partly because it is longer than a marketing page can be, and partly because the honest answer is often "you do not need to pay anyone for this." This site is where it lives. It is written to be useful whether or not you ever become a customer, and some of it will actively talk you out of spending money.
No invented facts, and no prices we cannot stand behind.
Where we give a range for restoration or scanning costs, it is a real market range and we say so when it varies by country. Where a claim is uncertain — how long a particular print will last, what a photograph is worth — we say it is uncertain rather than picking a confident number. Where automation is not good enough, we say that too, including about our own product.
Pages are reviewed as the market moves. Each guide carries the date it was last updated.
How this site relates to Pinin.
Try Pinin is an independent publication owned by Pinin. Some pages link to Pinin, and where an automated restoration service is the sensible route we say so plainly rather than pretending to be neutral about a product we make.
What we do not do: recommend professional restoration when it is not warranted, claim that software reconstructs missing detail as well as a skilled human, or tell you an old photograph is valuable when it is not. Those three things are the bulk of what is wrong with this corner of the internet, and correcting them is the point of the site.
Editorial questions, corrections and disagreements are welcome. Corrections are made on the page itself rather than kept in a changelog, and anything that rests on an institution is attributed by name so you can check the work yourself.
Start where the work actually starts.
Almost every photograph in the box needs two things before it needs restoring: sorting, and getting out of the room it is currently in.