Is there any way to improve the quality of old photos?

I have a sandwich baggy with about four or five micro as cards, plus four old iPhones where I have thousands of pictures dating back to 2008 when my daughter was born. I recently started putting them all in a computer and getting them all in order by dates. My ultimate goal is to start getting them all developed into physical pictures. As you can imagine, the older pictures from old phones, blackberries, iPhone 4 are a lot lower quality than those of my more recent photos on my current iPhone 8. And when you load them onto my computer and can compare them you can really see the difference and the lower quality really shows up when they are seen on a computer screen versus a small cell phone screen. I'm just wondering if there are any ways to improve the quality of some of the older photos to bring them closer to the quality of the more recent photos?

You could improve the colors, but thats really it

You are going to be pretty limited. Essentially you have data limited to what the camera could do at the time you took it and there's no much you can do try improve that (there might be a way with really expensive hardware and software, but probably not what you are looking for)

You can definitely adjust the levels or the curves with a simple photo editing software and that will make a big difference on the older photos.

If you use something that has a "noise removal filter" with the option of JPEG artifact removal, that may improve the images near edge or colour transitions.

Save them as either .png or use .jpg but with quality at or near maximum.

The jpg image format uses "lossy compression" to reduce the file size - but causes loss of quality as well, when the image is compressed.

As long as the image size of the originals was somewhere near 3000 x 2000 pixels (or more), they will be fine when printed at normal photo.
Normal 35mm colour film typically has around that equivalent resolution, so photos printed from digital images of around that or better should be as good as film camera prints.

If the old images are really low resolution there's not much you can do; they just do not contain the same data a higher resolution photo would.

If pixelation is obvious you can possibly smooth it out a bit; resize the image to an exact multiple of its original size, eg. 8x both ways. Do any noise removal and adjustments to brightness & contrast at that scale.
When you are done, reduce it to a more practical resolution, again an exact fraction (1/2 or 1/4) of the expanded image size. That should give some pixel smoothing without messing up the original detail too much. Eg. If it were 1024 pixels wide, change to 8192 then to 4096 or 2048 after processing.

Never overwrite the original images, so you can always go back to those if something goes wrong!

Digital pictures are already pictures. They're electronic so yes, you can have them printed for hard copies (on paper). You don't develop digital pictures. You only do that with film, to get the pictures, then print them afterwards.

There's nothing you can do to improve the quality of those pictures. Pictures from phones, especially the old ones, were made to look good in a phone's screen. You have discovered that picture quality is best seen on a larger screen, like that of a computer. What you can do is to print them in small sizes. Perhaps picture quality won't degrade much. Ask your printer (the shop who'll be doing the prints for you) on what size would be good enough (if ever).

More recent photos have more megapixels so they're larger and will look good on a computer screen when exposed correctly. It doesn't mean that if a picture is huge, it's big. It's quite possible to get horrible shots too with a new phone (or camera). It's all about the skill of the photographer.

You can "enhance" pictures using somthing like Photoshop, make them brighter, and appear a bit sharper, but there's no way to add detail that isn't in the picture already

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