If you’re on social media, you’ve undoubtedly seen black-and-white video animations on your homepage at some point this year. While the emergence of deepfake technology may make you anxious, these strange video clips are genuinely from the genealogy website MyHeritage. The software, which MyHeritage refers to as Deep Nostalgia, was licensed from the video reenactment business D-ID. The function enables MyHeritage users to animate faces in old photographs, bringing ancestors’ and famous people’s likenesses to life and giving us a glimpse of how they might have seemed in real life.
Deep Nostalgia begins by improving low-quality photographs with MyHeritage’s Photo Enhancer to boost resolution, then uses a variety of drivers that each include a set of pre-programmed movements derived from real people. The end result is a brief film with a variety of facial expressions and head movements. Gilad Japhet, the founder and CEO of MyHeritage, predicted that users would have a “wow moment” while using the Deep Nostalgia function to bring a priceless family photo to life. “Watching the faces of our cherished ancestors come to life in a video simulation allows us to envisage how they might have been in reality and offers a deep new method of relating to our family history,” he said. In its FAQ, MyHeritage advises users against utilizing the function on living individuals without their consent and clarifies that it should only be used for sentimental purposes. In the interest of preventing users from adding speech to clips of real individuals, the website does not feature audio. Continue reading to learn how to use MyHeritage’s Deep Nostalgia to bring your old family images to life.
Here’s how to use MyHeritage’s Deep Nostalgia feature to animate your photos:
- Visit myheritage.com/deep-nostalgia
- Choose the file you wish to animate by clicking “Upload Photo”
- Establish a MyHeritage account or sign in using Facebook or Google
- Await the animation of your image, which should take 10 to 20 seconds
- When it’s finished, select “Download video” to store and post your animation to social media
When you submit a face, the system will decide which sequence to apply automatically. Nevertheless, once the film has been created, you can experiment with different sequences by going to the website’s “My Pictures” section. Here, you can click “Animation” to test out more animations, ranging from standard poses to unique gestures like winking, dancing, and sideways eyes. Several faces in a single image can also be animated, but you’ll need to make a different animation for each one. MyHeritage is free to use, but the number of animations you can make with a free account is constrained. For customers who want to make an unlimited amount of watermark-free animations, the website now provides a Full membership option. It’s always a good idea to be aware that posting photographs to sites like MyHeritage can harm your online privacy, even though the company claims it doesn’t share your images with anyone else.
