Photo to video animation
Give a still picture some motion. Upload a photo and an image-to-video model animates what the scene implies — then the clip is closed into a loop you can play on repeat.
Drop a photo here to turn it into a seamless loop
JPG, PNG or WebP · up to 8 MB · 1 free loop per day, no signup
What the animation actually does
The model reads the picture and predicts plausible movement inside it. Sky and cloud drift. Water ripples and catches light. Smoke and steam rise. Foliage and fabric sway. The camera can push in gently. It is not a pan-and-zoom effect over a flat image — new frames are generated, so things move within the scene rather than the whole picture sliding around.
You can nudge it with a short motion hint. 'Drifting clouds, still water' or 'slow push in, snow falling' tends to work better than a long description, because the picture already carries most of the information.
Ken Burns is not this
The classic way to 'animate' a photo is the Ken Burns effect — slowly zooming and panning across a still. It adds movement to the frame but nothing inside the picture ever changes; it is a static image being moved past a window.
Generated animation is different in kind: the water genuinely moves, the light genuinely shifts. That is also why it has failure modes a zoom never had — fine text can warp and small faces can smear, because those regions are being re-imagined frame by frame.
Getting a better result
Use a reasonably high-resolution photo with a clear subject. Avoid pictures that are mostly small text or logos. Scenes with natural atmosphere — weather, water, light, fire — animate far more convincingly than flat studio shots.
Because the finished clip mirrors itself to close the loop, favour ambient motion over one-way action. Waves and cloud look right in both directions; a person walking across frame will visibly walk backwards.
Questions
- How long does it take?
- Usually about a minute. Most of that is the animation step; closing the loop takes a few seconds.
- Can I animate a photo of a person?
- Yes, and hair and clothing tend to move nicely. Faces are the hardest thing for any video model, so expect small features to shift — a portrait at a reasonable size works better than a distant crowd.
- What do I get?
- A 6-second MP4 with no watermark: three seconds of generated motion plus the same three reversed, so it repeats cleanly.
- Do you keep my photo?
- Your upload is sent to the rendering provider to produce the video and is not used for anything else.