How I Built an AI Photo Restoration Tool with Next.js & Gemini in 3 Months

Hey everyone! 👋 I spent the last 3 months building Mimoir AI, a platform that restores old photos with AI and generates people's life stories as narrated documentaries. Here's the journey, the wins, and the parts I'd do differently. The Origin Story I found a box of my grandparents' old photos in the attic. Most were too faded or damaged to see clearly. Looking at a picture of my grandmother from the 1960s — face completely washed out — I thought: "There's probably an AI model that could fix this now." That one photo sparked the entire project. The Stack (Why These Tools) Next.js 14 (App Router) — needed a fast way to ship, Vercel's serverless is perfect for early-stage MVPs Supabase — wanted Auth out-of-the-box, didn't want to manage PG myself Google Gemini 3.1 Flash Image — image-in-image models are still underrated; Gemini's understanding of semantics crushed it compared to chaining multiple specialized models ElevenLabs TTS — best naturalness-to-cost ratio I found FFmpeg on Vercel