About PicToLife

Most families have a box somewhere — prints going soft at the corners, a wedding photo that has lost its colour, someone’s father at twenty-three looking straight down the lens. The people in them are vivid to whoever remembers them, and flat to everyone else.

PicToLife exists to close that gap. Give us one still photograph and we give it back a few seconds of motion — a breath, a small smile, a glance that lands. Not a performance, and not an invention. Just enough movement that a grandchild who never met them gets some sense of what they were like in a room.

What we make

Motion Portraits turn a single photo into a short, cinematic loop. People make them for reunions, for the family archive, and — often — to play at a service, where a photograph on an easel has never felt quite equal to the occasion.

Restoration handles prints that time got to first. Creases and torn corners are rebuilt, faded colour is rebalanced back toward what the day actually looked like, and soft or grainy originals come back with the expression intact. A scan is ideal, but a phone photo of the print works too.

Moving cards are the lighter end of it — a photo someone loves, set gently in motion, sent for a birthday or an anniversary or no reason at all.

How we handle your photographs

Family photos are not ordinary uploads, and we try to treat them accordingly. Your images are encrypted in transit and at rest, and they are never used to train AI models — not ours, not anyone else’s. Drafts you abandon are cleared after 30 days rather than kept indefinitely.

Every upload passes three moderation checks before anything reaches your device. That occasionally means we decline something we shouldn’t have; when it happens, appeals are answered within 24 hours. Our content policies are public, and if a creation depicts you or infringes your rights you can ask us to remove it whether or not you have an account.

Being straight about the technology

This is generative AI, and we would rather say so plainly than dress it up. A Motion Portrait is a plausible few seconds of movement inferred from one frame — it is not footage, and it is not a recording of something that happened. What it can do is genuine: it gives a still face presence again. What it can’t do is tell you how someone actually moved. We think that distinction matters, particularly given what people use this for.

How we charge

Your first 25 credits are free and don’t need a card. After that a $6 starter pack — one video, one per account, no subscription — or a plan if you’re making a lot. No dark patterns, no cancellation maze. See the pricing.

Talk to us

We’re a small team and we read everything that comes in. If something isn’t working, or a restoration didn’t come back the way you hoped, tell us — get in touch and a person will answer.