Deep Nostalgia™ is a wildly popular MyHeritage feature that allows you to animate the faces in your old family photos.
This tool identifies the faces in your photos and applies a series of gestures to them based on pre-recorded driver videos of real people blinking, smiling, and moving their heads. The result is realistic, high-quality footage of what your ancestors may have looked like in motion.
It is extremely rare to have footage of one’s ancestors from before home videos became common in the 1970s and 1980s. With Deep Nostalgia™, you can bridge this technological gap and see what they might have looked like when they smiled, blinked, and looked around. Many of our users have found the experience to be deeply moving — whether they are using it to connect with ancestors they’d never known who died long ago, or to revive the memory of a lost loved one after many years with only a still photo to remember them by.
Deep Nostalgia™ works just as well for black and white photos, color photos, or photos that have been colorized or had their colors restored by MyHeritage In Color™ (see below). Photos are automatically enhanced using the Photo Enhancer (see below) before animation to achieve optimal results.
How to use Deep Nostalgia™
- Visit myheritage.com/deep-nostalgia.
- Upload your photo.
- If your photo contains more than one face, select the face you wish to animate.
If your photo has already been uploaded to MyHeritage, you can animate it directly from the photo page:
- Visit “My photos” in your MyHeritage family site (under the “Photos” tab in the navigation bar) or in the MyHeritage mobile app.
- Select the photo.
- Click or tap the “animate” button above the photo (the moving ball icon).
- If the photo features more than one face, select the face you wish to animate.
For more detailed instructions, see the following resources: