MyHeritage Releases Groundbreaking Feature to Animate the Faces in Still Photos

MyHeritage, the leading global service for discovering your past and empowering your future, announced today the release of Deep Nostalgia™, a new feature that animates the faces in still photos. Deep Nostalgia™ gives family history a fresh new perspective by producing a realistic depiction of how a person could have moved and looked if they were captured on video. MyHeritage is the only company to offer a complete suite of features for colorizing, restoring, enhancing, and now animating historical photos.

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Introducing Deep Nostalgia™ (Photo: Business Wire)

The technology for animating the faces in photos was licensed by MyHeritage 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.

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 colorizes black and white photos and was recently expanded to also restore the colors in faded color photos. These features have gone viral and have been used over 30 million times. MyHeritage keeps building on that momentum by adding new, cutting-edge tools for historical photos that inspire a fresh appreciation for family history and nostalgic family 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.”

“This new product integration is an exciting collaboration between two innovative companies,” said Gil Perry, Co-Founder and CEO of D-ID. “We’re thrilled that our technology will be accessible to millions of people on MyHeritage and hope many of them will enjoy the impact of video reenactment for historical photos.”

Integration into the MyHeritage platform

Deep Nostalgia™ is a freemium feature on MyHeritage. Users can animate several photos for free, regardless of the number of faces in the photo. Beyond that, continued use requires a subscription. The video animation can easily be shared with family and friends on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and other social media.

About MyHeritage

MyHeritage is the leading global discovery platform for exploring family history. With billions of historical records and family tree profiles, and with sophisticated matching technologies that work across all its assets, MyHeritage allows users to discover their past and empower their future. MyHeritage DNA is one of the world’s largest consumer DNA databases, with more than 4.7 million customers. MyHeritage is the most popular DNA test and family history service in Europe. Since 2020, MyHeritage is home to the world’s best AI technologies for enhancing and colorizing historical photos. www.myheritage.com

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