Upscayl
App : A product you use directly
Enlarges and restores images up to 16x locally, without watermark.
The free upscaler to install before paying for Topaz.
Security reflects where data goes, requested permissions and incidents on record at the verification date. It is not a guarantee of zero risk: check the deployment mode and the connections you enable.
What it does, concretely
Blurry, pixelated, or low-resolution photos are hard to use: disappointing prints, impossible cropping, damaged memories. Upscayl addresses this by enlarging images up to 16 times their original size using AI models, without relying on an online service.
The tool is built on Real-ESRGAN and a Vulkan architecture. In practice, you load an image, choose from several available models, select the desired enlargement factor, and start processing. Everything happens on your machine: no image is sent to a third-party server. You can also process multiple images in batch or apply two successive upscaling passes for an even sharper result.
Upscayl is aimed at creators, designers, artists, developers, and anyone who wants to improve image quality without a subscription or expensive software. It runs on Windows 10 and later, macOS 12 and later, and Linux.
However, Upscayl does not fix images that are blurry due to poor focus or motion blur: it improves pixelated or low-resolution images, not out-of-focus ones. A Vulkan-compatible graphics card is required; most integrated GPUs are not supported.
What it offers
- ·Image upscaling up to 16x using multiple AI models based on Real-ESRGAN.
- ·Fully local processing: no image is sent to an external server.
- ·Batch processing to upscale multiple images in a single operation.
- ·Double upscaling (two successive passes) for even sharper results.
- ·Choice of several models depending on the image type (High Fidelity, Remacri, UltraSharp, Ultramix Balanced, etc.).
- ·Support for custom models available as separate downloads.
- ·Graphical interface available on Windows, macOS, and Linux, with a command-line option via upscayl-ncnn.
- ·GPU selection when multiple graphics cards are present.
In practice
- Price
- Free
- Commercial use
- Commercial use: yes
- Available on
- windows, macos, linux
- Licence
- AGPL-3.0
- FR interface
- No
Security and data
- Rating
- Security: nothing to flag
- Your data
- Data stays local
- Maintenance
- Active
- Last release
- 25 December 2024
Links and repository checked on 25 October 2026 · added on 1 September 2022
How to install Upscayl
brew install --cask upscayl