Old photos and video, new colors, same WebUI

What it does

sd-webui-deoldify is an extension for AUTOMATIC1111’s Stable Diffusion WebUI that colorizes black-and-white photos and video using the DeOldify model. It adds dedicated tabs to the WebUI interface, letting you upload media and adjust parameters like Render Factor alongside your existing diffusion pipeline. The project also ships with an open-source Discord bot, DeOldifyBot, for colorizing images via a server chat interface.

The interesting bit

Rather than treating colorization as a separate toolchain, it folds the capability into the same UI where you might already be running GFPGAN or upscalers for face restoration. The video path is handled natively within the extension, and the companion Discord bot suggests the author sees this less as a one-off script and more as a small media-rendering service.

Key highlights

• Colorizes both still images and video from inside the WebUI Extra and DeOldify tabs.
• Explicitly tested on Windows 11 and Linux across several PyTorch versions up to 2.0.1+cu118.
• Ships with DeOldifyBot, a standalone Go-based Discord bot that hits the same backend.
• Plays nicely with existing WebUI restoration pipelines like GFPGAN and upscalers.
• Resolved earlier safe-unpickle compatibility issues so it no longer needs --disable-safe-unpickle at startup.

Caveats

• Several features remain on the TODO list, including dedicated repair options and X/Y/Z-style batch generation across different Render Factor values.
• Video colorization depends on ffmpeg being available on the host system; the extension does not bundle it.

Verdict

Worth a look if you already live inside AUTOMATIC1111’s WebUI and want to restore old family photos or archival footage without maintaining a separate colorization environment. If you are not using the WebUI ecosystem, this is just a thin wrapper around DeOldify and not worth the context switch.