To animate new photos that haven’t been uploaded to MyHeritage yet, you can upload and animate them at myheritage.com/deep-nostalgia.
Click “Upload photo” to choose a file from your computer. Or, drag and drop a photo of your choice into the photo frame.
Once you upload your photo, you’ll be asked to sign up to MyHeritage to animate your photos. Signing up is free. If you already have a MyHeritage account, and aren’t logged in, select the “Log in” option on the bottom of the popup.
Once the photo has been uploaded, select a face to animate from among the individual faces that have been detected in the image.
Animating one face in a photo typically takes between 10 and 20 seconds, depending on the length of the driver video that we’re applying to it. Videos that consist of a longer sequence of gestures take longer to create.
Once your animated video is ready it will start playing immediately. Hover over it to pause the video at any point.
What if I want to animate photos that I already have on my family site?
You can also animate any photo that is already on MyHeritage by visiting the “My Photos” section of the website.
Select one of your photos, and click the new “Animate” button.
If only one face is detected in your photo, we’ll begin animating it right away.
If there is more than one person in the photo, you can choose which face to animate by selecting from the bar below the photo which shows all the individual faces detected in the image.
Once complete, you’ll be able to watch the output video of your animation.
Sharing and Saving
Once you’ve created your video animation, you’ll surely want to share it with your friends and family. Click on the Share icon to share the original photo or the animation on Facebook, Twitter, or to easily copy the link. Select Download to save the video animation in mp4 format.
Authenticity
The gestures in the driver videos that are used to create the animation sequences are real human gestures and the actors in most of these blueprint videos are employees of MyHeritage. However, the end result is not authentic — it’s a technological simulation of how the person in your photo would have moved and looked if they were captured on video.
We believe it is our ethical responsibility to make sure that people see the difference between simulated videos created using deep learning and original photos or videos. For this reason, we differentiate animated photos from the originals using a special embossed motion icon (it looks like a moving ball) in the bottom left corner of the photos. Together with the magic wand icon indicating that the photo was enhanced, these icons appear on all animated photos so that users can tell them apart from the original. If the animation was created on a colorized photo, the palette icon will appear next to the magic wand and motion icons on the bottom left corner.
You’ll see the same icon in the thumbnails of the photos that you’ve already animated in the My Photos section of your family site. This icon will help you keep track of which photos you’ve animated.
What if I have a photo with more than one face?
Once you upload a photo, we automatically detect the faces in it, and allow you to select a face to animate. We are usually able to find most faces that are present in a photo, but there are cases where some faces are not detected. Currently, only faces that have been detected by the algorithm can be animated.
You can animate all the detected faces in a photo, but in the current version of this feature, they cannot all be animated at the same time. You’ll need to create a separate animation for each face, one at a time.
If you’re viewing a photo from the My Photos section of the website, you’ll be able to tell which faces have been animated by looking at the individual faces below the main photo — those with an animation appear with a play button.
To learn more about this topic, read this article on the MyHeritage Knowledge Base:
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