How to animate your old photos: MyHeritage's 'Deep Nostalgia' Feature is going viral

Genealogy platform MyHeritage has released a feature called 'Deep Nostalgia' that animates faces in still photos using video reenactment technology. According to MyHeritage, the technology for animating the faces in photos was licensed from D-ID, a company that specializes in video reenactment using deep learning.

Deep Nostalgia uses several pre-recorded driver videos prepared by MyHeritage, which direct the movements in the animation and consist of sequences of real human gestures. A preferred driver is automatically selected for each face based on its orientation, and then seamlessly applied to the photo. The result is a short, high-quality video animation of an individual face that can smile, blink, and move. To achieve optimal results, the photos are enhanced prior to animation using the MyHeritage Photo Enhancer, which brings blurry and low-resolution faces into focus and increases their resolution, according to MyHeritage website.

Getting started:

According to a tutorial on the platform's website, to animate new photos that haven’t been uploaded to MyHeritage yet, users 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 users upload a photo, they will be asked to sign up to MyHeritage to animate the photos. Signing up is free. If users already have a MyHeritage account and aren’t logged in, they can select the “Log in” option on the bottom of the popup. 

• Once the photo has been uploaded, users can 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 to 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 the animated video is ready it will start playing immediately. Hover over it to pause the video at any point.

Animating photos already on MyHeritage

• Users can also animate any photo that is already on MyHeritage by visiting the “My Photos” section of the website.

• Select one of the photos, and click the new “Animate” button.

• If only one face is detected in your photo, the platform will begin animating it right away.

• If there is more than one person in the photo, users 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, users will be able to watch the output video of the animation. 

Animating your photos using the mobile app

Deep Nostalgia is also available on the free MyHeritage mobile app, which can be downloaded from the App Store or Google Play. If users already have the app, they will need to update it first to make sure they are using the latest version. Users can animate photos from the Photos section in the app or upload new photos to be animated. The platform recommends using the mobile app’s built-in scanner.

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According to a blog post on MyHeritage, over 1 million photos were animated in the first 48 hours alone, since February 25. Deep Nostalgia is the newest AI-based photo tool on MyHeritage and comes on the heels of two highly-acclaimed features that the company released last year, the MyHeritage Photo Enhancer and MyHeritage In Color, which colourizes black and white photos and was recently expanded to also restore the colours in faded colour photos.

"You’ll have a ‘wow moment’ when you see a treasured family photo come to life with Deep Nostalgia," said Gilad Japhet, Founder and CEO of MyHeritage. "Seeing our beloved ancestors’ faces come to life in a video simulation lets us imagine how they might have been in reality, and provides a profound new way of connecting to our family history."

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