I go too far
on purpose.

I work in IT and I don’t do anything halfway. I fix photos people gave up on, get files back off drives that quit, and build things well past the point where a normal person would’ve stopped.

Restore a photo See what I’ve built
The same face after restoration. The glasses, eyes and shirt collar are all sharp.
A face from a 1990s family snapshot at its original resolution, blurred into a few dozen pixels.
Original Restored

Family snapshot · detail at 100% 360 × 246 → 2160 × 1476

$2.50
Per photo,
bulk upscaling
36 hr
Typical
turnaround
$0
If the recovery
fails
Same day
Usual reply
to email
Latent

The picture is
still in there.

A latent image is the picture sitting on a piece of exposed film before anyone develops it. It’s all there, you just can’t see it yet. Latent data is the same thing on a hard drive: the file you deleted is usually still sitting there until something writes over it.

Photos and files sound like two different jobs. To me they’re the same one: something you can’t replace looks gone, and usually it isn’t. So they both live under one name, Latent.

There are apps that’ll upscale a photo for thirteen cents, and they’re pretty impressive. They’ll also happily invent a face that was never there. You’re paying me to catch that, and to tell you up front when a photo just isn’t going to work.

Bulk upscaling & enhancement

Small, blurry photos made big and sharp enough to print. Software does most of it, I check every one, and the price reflects that.

from $2.50per photo · 10 minimum

Damage restoration

Tears, water damage, fading, mold, missing corners, weird color casts. This is the hand work.

$20–$125per photo · by severity

Digitizing prints, slides & VHS

Send the shoebox or the tapes. You get them back as files, cleaned up too if you want.

from $0.60per scan · $25 per tape

File & data recovery

Deleted files, formatted cards, drives your computer won’t see anymore. The evaluation is free.

$149–$349no data, no fee

Fair warning: what I can do depends way more on what you send than on the software. I’ll look first and tell you what’s realistic before you spend anything, even when the answer is “don’t bother.”

Selected work

Projects that
escalated.

None of these were planned. Something small bugged me, it turned out to be interesting, and then it was 3 a.m.

A puzzle game with real ray tracing Glass cubes with real refraction, running on the iPhone’s ray tracing hardware. Light bends through each cube, picks up its color, and lands on the shelf as a colored shadow. Locked at 120 Hz. MetalHardware RTSDF raymarching A photograph you can look around Flat photos turned into 3D gaussian splats on a holographic display. It draws 66 views of the scene every frame, and I measured it at 270 fps, about four and a half times what it needs. Gaussian splattingMetalLooking Glass The Sonos wall panel A touchscreen on the wall that runs the music in the house. It boots straight into the app, the background colors come from the album art, and it talks to the speakers over the local network, so it doesn’t care if the internet is down. Raspberry Pi 5Svelte + WebGL2Local UPnP The sim rig The sim knows your left front is about to let go before you do. This rig makes you feel it. Five haptic channels, two wind pods, and a harness that tightens when you brake, on a cockpit with nothing to bolt any of it to. CAD3D printingArduino The model that lost to Vegas I built a model to beat the betting line and trained it on 6,398 games. It lost. I published that and rebuilt the app around what the numbers actually said. PythonSwiftUICalibration

All projects

Also available

Hyperfocus,
for hire.

I’ll happily spend six hours finding the right part. Some people would rather pay for that than do it. Consulting and project planning are open now, and the shop is still getting stocked.

Smart home consulting

What to buy, what to skip, and how to set it up so it still works after the novelty wears off. Done over a call or as a written plan.

$95an hour · or $295 for a whole-house plan

Project planning & sourcing

Tell me what you want to build and I’ll send back a parts list with links and prices, the order to do it in, and the mistakes to avoid.

$150per project · $275 with build support

The print shop

Stuff I designed, sold as a finished print or as the file if you’d rather print it yourself.

Not open yetthe sim rig parts come first
Who’s doing the work
Drew Springer

Hi, I’m Drew.

I work in IT, so most days I’m figuring out why something that worked yesterday doesn’t today. Turns out that’s great practice for fixing a photo or getting files off a drive that gave up.

I’m neurodivergent, and for me that means my attention doesn’t have a volume knob. If something grabs me, it gets all of it. I once spent an entire evening making sure every contact in my phone had the right company logo. Completely ridiculous. It’s also exactly who you want working on your grandma’s only wedding photo.

So this site is half a log of projects I got carried away with, and half a way to point that same energy at stuff people actually need done. If that sounds useful, say hello.

Got something
worth saving?

Send me a photo of the photo, or tell me what the drive is doing. You’ll know what I can do and what it costs before you commit to anything.

See restoration pricing Start a free recovery evaluation