I am learning how to restore photographs in Gimp. I am currently working on restoring old photographs for my grandfather but am stuck on how to remove the small dots on the picture attached below. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

You can use the cloning tool to remove them. Time consuming, but it will get it done.

my attempt (dots removed only partially)
final outcome in .png
steps done are the following
1-gimp levels 0.75 opacity 100% normal
2-gmic smooth bilateral 10,7,2,0,0,24,0 opacity 60% normal
3-new layer from visible
4-gimp noise generator Laplace 3.0

I think the healing tool is probably better than the clone tool. Perhaps use the healing tool for the face and the arms and speed up the process by using a more automated procedure for the remainder, as done by dinasset.

My attempt was done with just the healing tool (very quickly!). The dress needs more attention and I speeded up the process by cheating and adding blur to the already out of focus areas.

david.

Crap, I forgot about the healing tool. Yep, that would be better than the clone tool.

Jean: There are many techniques to restore photos. You will probably not do the same thing for each photo. My attempt on the baby photo used several different methods. I used colors brightness, contrast, levels to adjust lighting. Used a lot of the healing tool to rid of dots and spots. Also the resynthesizer/healing filter. It does much the same as the healing tool but you can do multiple dots at a time. I did use the clone tool to keep some of the texture on the blanket especially behind the baby's head. Many things can be done with the clone tool. One of our members has a nice tutorial on the clone tool: viewtopic.php?f=23&t=10371. I used the blur tool to smooth color shading on the face, and arms. I removed the shadow over the baby's chin as I thought it looked odd. I used the Beautify filter to add just a touch of pink to the skin so features were not so lost from all the restoration attempts. Some do not add any color if wanting to keep true to the old photo at its best. It's your judgement. My family likes for me to add "a little something" to them to personalize it a little bit.

I agree with David. The heal tool is probably best. May take a bit longer but is worth it. I only use the clone tool when it absolutely needs the colour in that area. The heal tool will give you a more natural look.
My result using just the healing tool.

Also Jean, try despeckle first when you have a lot of dots. Nice results Everyone