Import Guide

Bring Your Photos Out of MyHeritage

MyHeritage holds your tree and DNA matches. Nostalgia handles the photos restored, captioned, and shareable.

Why you'd bring photos into Nostalgia

MyHeritage bundles photo tools (Deep Nostalgia animation, In Color colorization, Photo Enhancer) into the family-history subscription. Those tools are useful, but they are not what MyHeritage optimizes for. Nostalgia is restoration-first: the repair pass comes before any stylistic change, and the archive stays private.

Your tree and DNA results stay on MyHeritage. It remains the system of record for names, relationships, and Smart Matches.
You get restore-first AI, Photo Insight, captions, back-of-photo notes, and private Family Vaults on the photo side.
Download is non-destructive. The original stays on your MyHeritage profile; you're working with a copy.

Step 1 — Download from MyHeritage

Sign in to MyHeritage. Go to myheritage.com and sign in to the account that owns the photos. The site is also reachable from the MyHeritage mobile app, but the web UI is easier for bulk downloading.
Open Photos → All Photos. From the top navigation, go to Photos → All Photos. This shows every photo uploaded to your site, including ones attached to people and events.
Select the photos you want. Click a photo to open it. Use the Download button (an arrow-down icon in the toolbar) to save the original file at the resolution MyHeritage has on record. The file saves to your device.
For a batch, use the multi-select. In the All Photos grid, hover over a photo and click the checkbox to multi-select. Use the Download action in the toolbar to download a zip of the selected photos. The zip contains the original files, not thumbnails.
Photo tools already applied? Grab both versions. If you've used MyHeritage's colorization, repair, or enhancement on a photo, MyHeritage will offer to download the processed version. Download both the original and the processed version so you can run the original through Nostalgia fresh.

Step 2 — Upload into Nostalgia

Open the Nostalgia library. On web or mobile, open your Library. Use Upload (web) or the Library Add button (mobile) to add the downloaded files. Zipped batches need to be unzipped first.
Let Photo Insight analyze them. Every upload gets a Photo Insight report — damage labels, era estimate, ranked repair plan, and conservation guidance. Use it to decide which photos are worth restoring and which may need a fresh rescan first.
Restore, caption, and organize. Run the recommended restore pass. Add captions from what you remember or what MyHeritage had attached as story text. Group photos into Family Vaults branch-by-branch.
Keep the archival master. Nostalgia never replaces the original upload — the archival master stays linked to every restored version. Export anytime.

Common pitfalls

Don't re-run a MyHeritage-enhanced photo without the original. If MyHeritage already colorized or enhanced the image, running it again through another AI model stacks interpretations and can drift further from the real person. Download the original (uncolorized) file where possible, and start from there in Nostalgia.
Watch for resolution. Some photos were uploaded years ago at small sizes. If the download looks tiny, check whether the same photo was uploaded to a different event or person at a higher resolution, and use that copy instead.
Bring the story with the photo. If MyHeritage has a description, date, or tagged people on a photo, copy that into the caption when you upload to Nostalgia. Tagged faces are especially useful when you later use Person records here.
Not every item downloads. Record documents and source scans are usually licensed and view-only. This guide is for family photos you or a relative uploaded, not for historical record documents.

When to send the restored photo back to MyHeritage

Totally your call. Some family historians keep the restored version in Nostalgia and leave the MyHeritage profile with the as-uploaded scan. Others upload the restored version to the MyHeritage profile so Smart Matches on related trees show the cleaner image. Nostalgia never assumes either — your files are yours.