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MyHeritage InColor™: Fun Gimmick or Historical Distortion? A Genealogist’s Take, Five Years Later
- Andy Lee
- May 24
- 2 min read
Old family photos carry weight. They preserve not just faces, but cultural context—fashions, expressions, even the limitations of photography itself. So when a tool like MyHeritage’s InColor™ comes along and says, “Let’s paint this in,” I pause.
Yes, AI colorization has been around for a while now. It’s slick. It’s fast. And it might help someone feel more connected to the past. But as genealogists, our job isn't to make the past prettier. It’s to make it clearer—and that means separating fact from fiction, even pixel by pixel.
How the Tool Works (and What It’s Really Doing)
InColor™ is a MyHeritage feature that uses artificial intelligence to guess what colors might have appeared in black-and-white or sepia-toned images. You upload a photo, click a button, and boom—your great-grandmother suddenly has pink cheeks and a powder-blue hat.
But here’s the problem: it’s a guess.
A dressed-up, machine-generated, historically indifferent guess.
That blue hat? Could’ve been brown. Or black. Or a hand-me-down dyed with whatever cheap solution was available. The photo looks more modern, yes—but also less honest.
A Word of Caution from Gutenberg
In the summer of 2024, I visited the Gutenberg Museum in Germany. One display stopped me cold.
The display explained that the image commonly used to depict Gutenberg himself—the guy credited with revolutionizing print—wasn’t actually based on any confirmed portrait. It was a mishmash of “stock faces” that illustrators cobbled together centuries after the fact.
Let that sink in.
A man whose whole legacy is about preserving truth through print is misrepresented by an image invented long after his death. That’s what happens when we don’t mark fiction clearly enough. And that’s exactly why I get twitchy about AI colorization.
If You Must Colorize, Label It
Look, I’m not trying to stop anyone from enjoying a jazzed-up version of Grandma in full faux technicolor. If that helps you connect with your family story—great. But if you do colorize, say so. Label the image. Add a caption. Make it painfully obvious to future generations that the colors came from a 21st-century algorithm, not a 19th-century camera.
Because history is hard enough to untangle without us layering digital fantasy over physical truth.
Where I Draw the Line
Personally, I’ll keep using AI for cleanup—removing scratches, water damage, maybe sharpening a blurry edge. That’s restoration. That’s respectful. But painting in a dress color or adding a rosy glow to cheeks? That crosses into reinvention. And that’s not my job as a genealogist.
Genealogy is full of gray areas—missing records, secondhand stories, fuzzy photos. We don’t need to add digital fog to the mix.
InColor™ is a fun toy, but don’t confuse it with a research tool. Use it if you want. Just own the fiction, and don’t let the pixels rewrite the past.
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