A simple yet configurable Ken Burns effect. Use a single image or queue multiple images. The Kens Burns effect is a popular transition effect in film popularized by American documentarian Ken Burns. It creates the effect of motion using still imagery.

KenBurns is written in Swift, use KenBurnsImageView from Swift or Objective-C. Examples are in Swift 3.0:

func newKenBurnsImageView(url: URL) -> KenBurnsImageView {
    let ken = KenBurnsImageView()
    ken.fetchImage(url: url, placeholder: UIImage(named: "placeholder"))
    ken.startAnimating()
    return ken
}

func stop(ken: KenBurnsImageView) {
    ken.stopAnimating()
}

func pause(ken: KenBurnsImageView) {
    ken.pause()
}

func resume(ken: KenBurnsImageView) {
    ken.resume()
}

Initialize with UIImage or URL, and there are some paramaters you can set to configure the appearance:

func newKenBurnsImageView(image: UIImage) -> KenBurnsImageView {
    let ken = KenBurnsImageView()
    ken.setImage(image: image)
    ken.zoomIntensity = 1.5
    ken.setDuration(min: 5, max: 13)
    ken.startAnimating()
    return ken
}

Ken Burns has been powering Calm’s nature scenes and meditations since 2016. We found that adding this effect in place of a static image improves click-through rates (and users love it).

Due to unfortunate circumstances, Calm has no direct affiliation with Ken Burns himself 😞

Launch and run

roadtrip.xcworkspace

To view demo

KenBurns is available through CocoaPods. To install it, simply add the following line to your Podfile:

pod "KenBurns"