You Can Bring Old Family Photos to Life in Seconds With This Impressive New Technology
Whether you’re flipping through your all-grown-up kid’s baby pics, looking back at loved ones who have passed on, or discovering long lost images of ancestors you never even met, old family photos are always so heartwarming.
Now, you can breathe life into those mementos with a fascinating new tool from genealogy website MyHeritage. The newly added feature known as Deep Nostalgia allows you to upload photos which the website then animates. It only takes a few moments to process each image, but the results might make you feel like you jumped into a time machine.
The website explains how it all works: “The Deep Nostalgia™ feature uses several drivers prepared by MyHeritage. Each driver is a video consisting of a fixed sequence of movements and gestures. Deep Nostalgia™ can very accurately apply the drivers to a face in your still photo, creating a short video that you can share with your friends and family. The driver guides the movements in the animation so you can see your ancestors smile, blink, and turn their heads.”
It’s important to note that as a quick, automated service, it’s not always a 100 percent mind-blowing rendering of a photo. Things like the way someone’s head is turned or whether they’re making a silly face in the pic can give you less realistic results. That said, you still might find yourself getting goosebumps when you see an old snapshot suddenly spring to life before your eyes.
And although it works on photos with more than one person, it will select them one at a time to animate. For example, we tried it with this anonymous family photo we found:
Now hit play below to see how the Deep Nostalgia function focused on animating the woman’s face:
Pretty uncanny, right? Don’t be surprised if you find yourself getting emotional if you try the same with your own pics!
Another important note: You can use the service with a few photos for free, but will have to sign up for a MyHeritage account for unlimited Deep Nostalgia access and more photo tools, like quickly enhancing the quality or restoring color. Plus, you’ll be able to use the website to research your genealogy with their database of historical records.
But even if you don’t sign up, it’s still a lot of fun to see how it can transform at least a few old family photos!
