You’ve done the hard part. You’ve tracked down an old photograph, stood in the same spot a hundred-and-something years later, lined up the landmarks, and produced a GhostViewer Creation – a then-and-now, rephotography, GIF or video that genuinely lets someone see through time.
Now what? For most people, the answer is to post it to Instagram, share it to the GhostViewer community, drop it into a local history blog, or embed it on a town council or family history page. And that’s where a raw export sometimes lets itself down – it’s the right shape for *a* platform, but not the one you’re posting to; there’s no caption to say High Street, 1898 → 2026; it looks a bit bare without a border; and the whole thing could do with five minutes of polish before it hits your feed.
That’s exactly what the GhostViewer Media Framer is for. It’s a free tool on the site that takes any GIF or short video – your GV Creations or anything else – and turns it into a tidy, captioned, aspect-correct, optional-sound/musical track, ready for wherever you’re sharing it. Everything happens in your browser – no upload, no sign-up, no watermark, and nothing stored on our servers.
Here’s what it does, and why it’s worth five minutes of your time.
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1. Your creation, framed in seconds
Drop a file in. Pick a preset. Hit Export. That’s the whole flow when you’re in a hurry – about fifteen seconds from upload to download, and you’ll already have a neatly bordered version of your clip with a shadow and optional caption.
No software to install, no subscription, no account. If you’ve just finished aligning a before/after in the main app, running the saved result through the Framer feels like a natural last step.
> **[Example 1 – Before and after: a plain GV Creation on the left, the framed export on the right]**
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2. One consistent look across a whole project
If you’re documenting a single street, a village, or the changing face of your woodland or coastline, you don’t want every post to look like it came from a different account. The Framer’s presets give every clip the same border, corner rounding, shadow and caption style – chosen once, applied forever.
There’s a built-in GhostViewer preset to get you started, and any control can be tweaked on the fly: border colour, thickness, shadow softness, caption colours. The preview updates as you drag, so you can dial in a project-specific look in under a minute and reuse it on every creation in the series.
> **[Example 2 – The same clip with three different presets side by side: the default GhostViewer look, something warmer, and a clean minimal version]**
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3. The right shape for the right platform
One of the unsung annoyances of sharing online is that every platform wants a different shape. Instagram feed likes square. Stories, Reels, TikTok and YouTube Shorts want vertical 9:16. YouTube and most blog headers still want widescreen 16:9.
Historic photos are almost never in any of those shapes – they’re often 4:3, 5:4, or an awkward panoramic crop from a plate camera. The Framer handles that gracefully: pick a target aspect ratio, and the clip is cropped to fit. If the interesting detail isn’t dead centre (as it rarely is with old photos – the landmark might be off to one side, or the foreground might be mostly empty road), drag the Focus sliders to keep the part you care about in frame.
> **[Example 3 – A wide then-and-now clip cropped to 9:16 vertical, with the focus slider pulled to one side to keep the key landmark in shot]**
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4. Dates, places and context without extra software
The single most-asked question under any then-and-now post is: When was the original taken, and where is this? You know the answer – put it on the clip itself.
Type a caption straight into the Framer. It sits at the top or bottom of the clip in whatever colour you like, burned into the export so it survives every download, every re-share, and every crop. High Street, looking east. 1898 → 2026. No video editor required.
> **[Example 4 – A then-and-now clip with a caption baked in, for example: “Market Square, Winchester. c.1905 → Today”]**
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5. A little atmosphere with music
A before/after reveal lands harder with some music underneath it. New in this version of the Framer: **background music**. Pick a track from the curated list – kept small and on-theme, with options that suit gentle historical content rather than action-movie drama – hit *Sample* to audition it, drag the volume to taste, and it’ll be mixed into your exported video.
The music replaces any sound already on your clip (so traffic noise from when you were filming the *today* half disappears), loops automatically if your clip is longer than the track, and fades out cleanly at the end.
Music works on **WebM video** exports. GIFs have no sound by design, so the Framer hides the music picker automatically when you switch the export format to GIF – you’ll never miss it by accident.
> **[Example 5 – Two versions of the same then-and-now clip: the raw silent export, and the same clip with music mixed in. Ideally embedded videos so visitors can actually hear the difference.]**
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6. GIF or video – your destination, your choice
Some places still prefer GIFs – email newsletters, older forum posts, community groups where embedded video has been known to misbehave. Others are happier with video (crisper, smaller, no frame-rate compromise). The Framer can produce either:
– WebM video – fast to export, small files, high quality, sound supported. Works in Chrome, Edge and Firefox.
– GIF – universal, silent, slightly rougher around the edges. Works literally everywhere, including email clients, Reddit inline posts and most old-school forums.
Switch between them with a single dropdown and export whichever suits the destination. For most social and blog use a WebM is the better file; for a Facebook group post or an email to your local history society, a GIF is often the safer bet.
> **[Example 6 – The same GV Creation exported as both GIF and WebM, side by side, so readers can see the quality and file-size trade-off for themselves]**
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Everything stays on your device
Privacy matters on GhostViewer – the main app is built around browser-first image processing for exactly this reason – and the Framer is the same. Your clip is opened in your browser, framed in your browser, encoded in your browser, and saved to your downloads folder. It never touches our servers. Close the tab and it’s gone.
That matters if the photograph you’re working with came from a family album, a private archive, or a community member who’d rather their material didn’t sit on a third-party server.
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Give it a try
The Media Framer is free, no-login, and live on the site now. Take your most recent GV Creation – or dig out one you were never quite happy with – and see how much better it looks with a proper frame, a caption, and maybe a little atmosphere underneath.
If you build a preset style that works beautifully and you’d like to share it, or you spot something that could be improved, please [get in touch](https://ghostviewer.co.uk/contact-ghostviewer/). The Framer is still young, and the best features tend to come from what real users tell us they need.
