Upscayl alternative: upscale online, without installing anything

Upscayl is one of the best things to happen to free image upscaling. It wraps the open Real-ESRGAN family of models in a clean desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux, it is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence, and the desktop version is free with no account, no watermark and no limit on how many images you process.

Because it runs on your own computer, nothing is uploaded. For confidential work, or simply for people who would rather not send family photos to a server, that is a real advantage that no web tool, ours included, can match. It also processes whole folders in batch and lets advanced users load community models tuned for particular content.

If you have a capable graphics card and a lot of images, Upscayl is hard to beat on cost. We would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise.

It needs the right hardware. The project states that Upscayl requires a Vulkan-compatible GPU and that most integrated graphics will not work. On a laptop without a dedicated GPU, a Chromebook, a locked-down work computer or a phone, the desktop app is not an option. Upscayl Cloud exists for this, but it is a paid service (Pro is $24.99 a month for 300 credits, with outputs up to 256 MP) and the trial requires an application.

It upscales, it does not clean phone damage. The included models are general upscalers. They sharpen and enlarge what is in the file, which works well on clean images. A grainy night photo or a WhatsApp copy full of blocks needs the damage removed at the same size before any enlargement; otherwise the blocks and grain get enlarged too. That is the job of our Enhance model, and it is the main reason to use PhotoRescue even if you also use Upscayl.

Releases have slowed. The latest desktop release on GitHub when we checked was v2.15.0, from 25 December 2024. That is not a problem in itself, since the app works, but newer models will not arrive through updates as often.

PhotoRescue is a web app: you drop a photo into the page and the processing runs on our GPUs, so it works the same on a phone as on a desktop. Three models cover the common cases: Enhance for grainy and chat-app-compressed phone photos at the same size, Upscale 4× for most enlargements (inputs up to 5 MP), and Upscale 8× for small images headed for a poster (inputs up to 1.25 MP, 2 credits). Output goes up to 80 MP.

The trade-off is cost and privacy. After 3 free credits a day you pay per month, and your photo is uploaded to our servers, where it is deleted within 24 hours. It is never used to train AI.

A useful workflow if you already use Upscayl: run noisy or chat-app photos through Enhance first, then upscale them wherever you prefer.

Benchmarks on someone else's pictures tell you little about yours. A fair test takes ten minutes:

1. Pick two or three photos you actually need to fix: the small one, the noisy one, the one with a face or text.
2. Run each through Upscayl and through PhotoRescue at the same scale. Our free plan needs no account; results carry a watermark, which does not get in the way of judging quality.
3. Open both results side by side at 100% zoom, not fitted to the screen. Look at edges, faces, foliage and any lettering.
4. Ask two questions: does it look natural, and is it still the same photo? Extra crispness that changes a face or invents letters is not an improvement.