Neil Headrick has been using AI to add life to historical Prince Albert photos. (Submitted photo)

By Teena Monteleone

Take a step back in time

Local resident brings historic Prince Albert to life using AI

Nov 4, 2025 | 6:00 AM

About 25 years ago, Neil Headrick bought some CDs featuring digitized photos from the Prince Albert Historical Society for about $8. He spent some time adding colour to the old black and whites that captured moments of Prince Albert’s past. Recently, he started adding animation to the photos with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). What it’s led to is a priceless opportunity to feel like you’re actually taking a step back in time.

Headrick posts the updated historic photos to his Facebook page and to a couple of different groups, including Historic Saskatchewan, where they’ve garnered a lot of attention. In the past month alone, his posts have been viewed 788,000 times.

“When you take that old, black and white picture and add colour to it, it seems to make it more personal. You can almost relate a little better when the picture is colour. And then when you take AI a step further and add animation, it changes it completely,” Headrick said.

“These people become human, even though…well, they were obviously, but they become more human and more attractive to people because it gives us a good glimpse into our past.”

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The original photos from the Prince Albert Historical Society that Headrick enhanced with AI. (Submitted/Neil Headrick)

Some of the photos are more than 150 years old. With the latest technology, he said it’s remarkably easy to bring the photos to life.

“Prince Albert was a vibrant community hundreds of years ago, and remained that way all though the years,” he said.

Headrick has been using programs like Photoshop to ‘clean up’ old family photos for years, but he’s particularly impressed with some of the newer programs that will even take creases or scratches out of old photos when digitizing them. He even uses AI to help describe the old photos.

“I’ve got one picture of Central Avenue with the Strand Theatre in the photo. You ask AI to describe the photo. Now, not only will it say ‘This is a main street of a city and it looks like a theatre in the picture’, it will say, ‘This is downtown Prince Albert, Central Avenue. The Strand Theatre is seen in the picture, which was built in 1919, closed in 1977. And the marquee, the title of the movie showing, indicates that this picture was probably taken around 1955.’ It goes into such great detail,” Headrick said.

“It’s a remarkable technology to use to help with history.”

Headrick uses AI programs to remove creases and scratches from old photos, and add colour. (Submitted/Neil Headrick))

For the most part, Headrick uses free programs and apps to enhance the photos. His favorite AI app is Microsoft Copilot, but to add colour to photos he prefers Google Gemini and Grok for adding movement.

He said some people may argue that colour shouldn’t be added to the historic photos.

“There are purists that say maybe just leave that black and white picture alone. Well, that black and white picture will always be there. That photograph is a document of history taken at that particular moment. That will never change just because we colourize or give them motion.”

For now, Headrick plans to keep posting his work online.

“They don’t do any good just sitting on a computer, or sitting in a box with the rest of your family photos, so it’s good to get them out there and share them, so I suppose we’ll look at what the best way to do that is.”

He plans on consulting with the Prince Albert Historical Society to see what they can do with his work – which will keep him busy for a while. He said they’ve got ‘tens of thousands of other photographs.’

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teena.monteleone@pattisonmedia.com