How to animate a photo

The whole process is five steps and about two minutes of your time. Here is what happens at each one, what to prepare before you begin, and where the finished video ends up.

Start with a photo

One sign-in with Google is all it takes — 300 credits are added to your account instantly.

The five steps

Prepare the digital copy

Scan the print or photograph it with your phone. Highest resolution you can manage, flat and evenly lit. This is the step that decides how good the result looks.

Sign in with Google

One click, no form to fill in. Your account is created at that moment and 300 free credits are added to it — enough for 1 video. No card is requested.

Upload the photo

Drag the file onto the page or click to choose it. JPG, PNG and WebP up to 10 MB. The photo is used to make the video and nothing else.

Press the button and wait

One button starts the generation. It takes roughly one to three minutes, and the page updates itself when the video is ready — you can leave the tab open and do something else.

Download it or save it to the cloud

Download the file while the free link is live, or use Save to cloud in your account to keep it permanently for a small credit charge. The cloud copy is the one that stays.

Preparing the photo properly

Everything downstream depends on this one step, and it costs nothing to get right. If you are working from a print, lay it on a plain, flat surface and shoot straight down at it rather than at an angle, filling the frame so the face takes up as much of the image as possible.

If you have a scanner, use it — a scanned copy will beat a phone photograph of the same print nearly every time, because it removes the glare, the perspective and the uneven lighting in one go. Save at a sensible resolution rather than shrinking the file to send it somewhere first.

Straight on, not at an angle
No lamp or window reflecting off the surface
Fill the frame with the face, not the whole page of the album
Save as JPG or PNG before uploading — do not compress it twice

Picking an image that will work

The animation is built from the details already present in your file, so a source with more detail produces a better result. Faces that are small in the frame, motion blur from the original camera, or a scan so heavily compressed that the skin has become blocky will all show their limits in the finished clip.

If you have several candidates, it is worth running the sharpest one first. The difference between a clear portrait and a soft one is obvious in the result, and it is much easier to judge once you have seen one that worked.

What happens while it generates

Your photo is sent to the model provider, which produces the video and returns a file. This normally takes one to three minutes, depending on how busy the service is. The page polls in the background and replaces the waiting state with the video on its own.

There is nothing to keep an eye on, so leave the tab open and come back. Refreshing the page does not make it faster, and closing the tab before it finishes means you lose sight of that particular result.

Getting the video onto your phone

The finished clip is a standard video file, so it behaves like any other: download it on a computer and it lands in your downloads folder, or download it on your phone and it goes to your camera roll or files app depending on the browser you use.

If the photo lives on your computer but you want the video on your phone, it is usually easiest to do the whole thing on the computer and then send yourself the file — there is no app to install on either device.

If the result is not what you hoped for

The two most common causes are a face that is too small in the frame and a source that is too soft or too damaged. Neither is fixable after the fact — the fix is a better source image. Restoring a scratched or faded photograph before uploading makes a larger difference than any setting on this page.

It is also worth lowering your expectations for wide or busy shots, and for anything where the face is seen in profile or hidden by a hat. A straightforward, front-facing portrait is what this does best, and the effect is meant to be modest even then.