PhotoMirage allows you to take a section of your image and animate is. There are some very scary GIF animations that have gone viral that owe their creation to this tool. It can animate elements as small as having somebody’s eyes move, all the way up to making it appear to be raining in an image.

Manipulate your photo to create a movement effect

PhotoMirage allows you to select parts of an image so that you may overlap and repeat that part of the image. If you do this in a certain direction, such as from left to right, then it appears as if the photo has moving parts. The user interface includes a screen with very simple tools on the left and your image on the right. You identify an area of your photo with the tools on the left, and you select sections that look similar. The tool moves part of your image in the direction you indicate, and then repeats the image to replace the part that moved. On its own, this effect looks like something from a cartoon hallucination, but when you select a section of your image and apply the tool in numerous positions within the selection, your photo image starts to look like it is moving. This is not like a GIF creator where you layer different images and make them move; this is all done with just one image.

An odd marketing tool

PhotoMirage has some hobbyist uses, but its biggest successes have come from the producers of viral content marketing. Some people have built a following by publishing their animated images on their website and social media profiles, and some marketing companies have spread brand recognition by churning out animated images. The advantage that this tool has over GIF creators is that you can just use one image rather than many, and artistic images may be manipulated in a way that is far less expensive than layering multiple images.