I like to think of myself as having an average social media presence. I’m not a complete novice that has one blurry photo with 10 followers. I also don’t have thousands of followers like some of my friends who consider themselves social media pros. I had a conversation with one of the social media “pros” I’m friends with about the work it takes to curate just one photo on their profile. I was pretty surprised at the level of time and effort it goes into just one picture that ends up getting posted for everyone to see. I decided to put more effort into my social media presence and downloaded an app called Zoominator to spice up my photos.
How it works
Zoominator is a free app that is only available on the App Store for iOS devices. Zoominator takes photos and videos in your library and lets you customize fun animations on them. Remember making PowerPoints as a kid and throwing in slide animations and Word Art. Zoominator pretty much uses this concept but with photos and videos.
When you first open up Zoominator, you’ll be directed to the photos that you have in your iPhone Photo library. Simply tap on the picture you wish to customize to begin. You’ll see three options located at the bottom of your screen: go back to photos, share photo, and edit photo. You’ll want to tap the third option to begin adding animations to your photo.
There are two main parts to adding animations to your photo: how you want the starting view to look like and how you want the ending view to look like. Changing the ending view is only necessary if you want to add effects like zooming into the photo or adding some sort of visual animation. If your goal is to edit a photo without any animation, you can keep the starting and ending view the same. However, you can do most of these in Instagram or even in your Photos app.
The power of Zoominator is to make a still photo into an interactive one that can zoom, pan, add text, etc. There are loads of options such as giving your photo a different filter, distorting the picture to make your friends look fat or ugly, or overlaying other pictures on top. If you’re the type of person who likes to create memes of your friends, Zoominator provides a really simple way of doing that to any photo.
Zoominator will automatically convert any animation you add to your photo into a video that is saved into your iPhone’s photo library. You can also tap the Share option to save your photo in a custom location or send it via text. You’ll be able to edit videos, but you’ll have to go into Zoominator’s settings and tap “enable video input”. This is off by default and it will prevent you from editing videos until you toggle it on.
Impressions
Zoominator is really simple and it should take only a couple of minutes to figure it out. Most of the time spent is figuring out what you want your starting view to be and then what you want your ending view to be. The main editing effects in the app are zoom, add text, overlay images, and add a filter to your photo.
I had a great time making goofy animations of my friends and myself using Zoominator. Here is a animated clip of me having the time of my life fishing in Texas.
Adding animations on Zoominator
Starting and ending view
Finished product!
Overall
Zoominator is a fun way to add animations to your photos. I like to think of it as adding PowerPoint animations to your photos. If you like making GIFS, memes, or just making short, funny clips, Zoominator is the way to go. Let us know below what you think of Zoominator!