Animate a picture

What the effect actually is

Nothing dramatic, and that is the point. The person in your picture does what people do in the pause between poses: an eye closes and opens, the shoulders rise with a breath, the head turns a degree or two. The picture is never redrawn and nothing is added to it — the movement is generated inside what the photograph already shows.

The restraint is why it convinces. Watching for a second, you see a person; watching closely, you can tell the motion was generated. A clip that survives a casual glance is the honest ceiling for something made from a single still image, and it is the ceiling this aims at.

What you need to bring

One digital picture and nothing else. No editing skills, no software to install, no list of options to learn — the whole interface is a photo picker and a button. If the picture lives in a shoebox rather than on your phone, photograph or scan it first; flat, straight-on and evenly lit is what works.

• JPG, PNG or WebP, up to 10 MB
• A phone picture of a print is fine when shot straight on
• Nothing to install — it runs in the browser

Picking the picture for your first attempt

Use your best one, not your most important one. A sharp portrait with one face, eyes open, filling a good part of the frame will almost always come back well, and seeing a good result first teaches you what this does faster than any description.

Save the difficult candidates — tiny faces in wide shots, soft focus, damaged prints — until you have seen one that worked. Those pictures can still animate, but their limits are easier to judge once you know what a clean source looks like in motion.

What it costs to find out

New accounts open with 300 free credits, added at sign-in with Google — that covers 1 video without any payment details. Trying it costs nothing but two minutes.

After that, each generation uses a fixed number of credits from your balance, shown before you press the button. Plans that refill the balance are in your account, and their prices are on the page before you pay anything.

When the video is done

Generation takes roughly one to three minutes. The finished clip arrives as an ordinary video file: download it while the link is live — the free link is temporary because the file lives with the model provider — or use Save to cloud in your account for a permanent copy at a small credit charge.

Not happy with the first attempt? The most common cause is a soft or cramped source picture, and a sharper photograph is the fix. Regenerating from a better picture costs the same as the first try.