When there is only one photograph.

01 · First, the copyCopy it properly before you do anything else.

If the print is the only one in existence, it should not leave the house. No exceptions, including a restorer who asks for it. Almost every professional can work from a good scan, and the ones who cannot are not the ones you want handling the only copy.

With a flatbed scanner — at a library, a print shop, or a relative's machine:

• 600 dpi, colour, no sharpening, no automatic correction.
• Save as TIFF or high-quality JPEG, not as a PDF.
• Scan it as it is. Do not clean it, do not press out the creases, do not trim it.

With a phone, if no scanner is available:

• Print flat on a table, in daylight near a window but out of direct sun. Never use the flash.
• Phone parallel to the print, not at an angle — any tilt creates a keystone distortion that has to be corrected later and never quite is.
• Fill the frame with the print, and get the whole print in, including the white border. You can crop later; you cannot recover an edge that was left out.
• Take three, and pick the sharpest. Tap to focus on the face, and hold still — brace your elbows on the table.
• Turn off any "document scan" or "auto enhance" mode. It will crop, straighten and sharpen, and you want none of that yet.

A phone photograph of a print is not as good as a scan, but it is much better than nothing and it is enough for a prayer card, a program cover, and the slideshow.

02 · Group shotsThe photograph has four people in it and you need one.

This is the most common version of the problem, and it is solvable. A head in a group photograph, cropped out and printed at 16 × 20, is a legitimate portrait — many of the photographs in family albums began this way.

The constraint is pixel count, not composition. If the person's head occupies one eighth of the width of a 4 × 6 print scanned at 600 dpi, you are working with about 300 pixels across the face. That prints well on a prayer card and badly on an easel.

So the arithmetic decides the ambition, and the answer is often a smaller print. Crop to head and shoulders, keep the whole head, and print at the size the pixels allow rather than the size the room wants. A sharp 8 × 10 of a face from a group shot is a good outcome; a soft 16 × 20 of the same crop is not.

If the crop cuts through someone's shoulder, that shoulder can be reconstructed by a person who knows what they are doing. It is a small invention — ask, if you commission it, exactly what was added. Why that question matters.

03 · Second-hand filesA profile picture, a screenshot, a photo of a photo.

Families often find that the best recent image of someone is a social media profile photograph, a screenshot of a video call, or a photograph of a framed print on a wall. Each has a specific weakness worth knowing before you commit to it.

The photo-of-a-print case is worth one more attempt if the print still exists: take it out of the frame, put it on a table, and photograph it flat. That single step removes the glare and the distortion at once, and it usually turns an unusable file into a fine one.

04 · Nothing existsWhen there is genuinely no photograph.

It happens, particularly for people who avoided cameras, and for generations before photography reached ordinary families. There is no restoration answer, so this is the honest version of the alternatives people use.

• A photograph of something of theirs — a garden, a chair, a tool, a table laid for a meal. Placed on the easel with their name, this is what many families do and it works.
• A document — a letter in their handwriting, a certificate, a recipe card. Framed rather than restored.
• The order of service as the centrepiece, with the name set large and the photograph omitted rather than substituted.
• A photograph of the family together, rather than of the person, which is honest about what exists.

What is worth avoiding is a portrait drawn or generated from a description. It looks like the person only in the way a police sketch does, and the people who knew them will find it unsettling rather than consoling.