How to Colorize Black-and-White Photos in Google Drive

If your black-and-white photos already live in Google Drive — scanned family albums, an estate archive, a shoot's contact sheets — the last thing you want is to download them, drag them into some website, wait, and re-upload the results into the right folders. Revive removes that whole round trip. It's a Google Workspace add-on that runs inside Drive, so you colorize photos in google drive without the files ever leaving Google's infrastructure.

This guide walks the full path: installing the add-on, opening the side panel, selecting files or an entire folder, clicking Colorize, and finding your results. It takes about two minutes end to end for a first job, and the click path is identical whether you're doing one photo or ten thousand.

What you need before you start

Just a Google account with Drive and the black-and-white images you want restored. Revive handles google drive photo colorization for the common scan and camera formats — JPG, PNG, HEIC, TIFF, and WebP as inputs, and it writes back a color JPEG every time. There's nothing to download to your computer, no separate login to create, and no credit card to try it: every new signup gets 3 free images.

The five-step click path

Here's the entire workflow at a glance. Each step maps to exactly what you'll click in Drive.

Step 1 — Install Revive

Open the setup guide or add Revive directly from the Google Workspace Marketplace. You'll see one consent screen describing the drive.file permission. Approve it and the add-on is ready — it attaches to Drive itself, so it's available the next time you open any folder. For teams, a domain admin can install it once for the whole Workspace; billing is shared across the org, and every user can spend from the same pool of image credits.

Step 2 — Open the side panel

Head to drive.google.com and look at the slim icon strip on the right edge of the window. Click the Revive icon and its panel opens alongside your files. This is your control surface for the whole job: it shows what you've selected, the image count, the Colorize button, and live progress. You can keep navigating folders in the main window while the panel stays put.

Step 3 — Select files or a whole folder

This is where Revive's folder-awareness does the heavy lifting. You have three ways to build your queue:

• One photo: click it. The panel shows a queue of 1.
• A handful: hold Cmd (Mac) or Ctrl (Windows) and click each photo you want.
• An entire folder: select the folder and Revive expands its tree, queuing every supported image inside — including images in sub-folders. The sub-folder structure is preserved in the output, so a nested archive comes out organized exactly the way it went in.

Batch size is effectively unbounded for a single run: 1, 100, or 10,000 images in one job. Because processing runs at roughly 50–100 milliseconds per photo, about 1,000 photos finish in roughly a minute. That's the practical difference between colorizing a shoebox archive over a weekend and doing it during a coffee break. If you want the full mechanics of how the folder tree is walked, the how it works page breaks it down.

Step 4 — Click Colorize

The panel shows exactly how many images are queued and how many credits the run will spend — 1 image = 1 colorized photo. Confirm and click Colorize. A live progress indicator tracks the batch as it goes. There's no upload bar, because nothing is being uploaded: Revive reads each file through Drive's APIs, colorizes it, and writes the result straight back.

Step 5 — Find your restored photos

When the run finishes, open the folder you started from. Every restored image sits right next to its original, named <original-name>-color.jpg. So grandma-1962.tiff becomes grandma-1962-color.jpg in the same place. Nothing is moved, renamed, or overwritten — the originals are exactly as you left them. For teams, every job is attributed in the usage report: who ran it, how many images, and which credits were spent.

Why the in-Drive path beats the upload-and-download route

Most colorization tools follow the same tired loop. Revive collapses it. Here's the side-by-side:

How the flow moves through Drive

Under the hood, nothing ever detours through outside storage. The diagram below shows the full loop — from your selection in the side panel, through processing, and back into the same folder.

What it costs

Revive is pay-per-image with no subscription, and image credits never expire. Bigger packs drop the per-photo price. Here's the ladder:

Credits are tied to your domain billing account and shared across every Workspace user, so one purchase covers the whole team. Full details and the FAQ live on the pricing page.

A few practical notes

Your originals are safe

Revive only ever adds files. It never modifies, moves, or deletes the black-and-white source. If you don't like a result, delete the -color.jpg copy and the original is right there, exactly as before.

Mixed folders are fine

Point Revive at a folder that has a mix of images and other files — it queues only the supported image formats and quietly ignores the rest. You don't need to clean up a folder before running it.

Start small, then scale

Run your 3 free images on a handful of your own scans first to see the quality on your material. When you're happy, select the whole archive folder and let it run. The click path never changes; only the count does.

Ready to go deeper on batch jobs? Read how to batch-colorize thousands of photos in Google Drive next, or start with the setup guide to get the add-on installed.