From Brixton market stalls to Marylebone estate agents, a growing number of independent traders are finding that the pictures already sitting on their phones can do a second job.
Walk through Borough Market on a Saturday morning and you will see two kinds of stallholders. The first has a chalkboard, a queue and no interest whatsoever in social media. The second is holding a phone at arm’s length, filming a wedge of Comté being cut, because a nine-second clip posted at lunchtime will bring in more customers on Sunday than any flyer ever did.
The second group is getting bigger. But what is more interesting is how they are making those clips. Increasingly, they are not filming at all.
The problem with video, if you run a shop
Anyone who has tried to keep a small business going in London knows the maths. Rents in the capital are among the highest in Europe, margins are thin, and the working day is already full before anyone mentions “content”. Video has been the thing every marketing article tells you to make, and the thing almost nobody in a two-person business has time to make properly.
Filming takes planning. Editing takes longer. Hiring someone to do it costs money that a florist in Peckham or a bike repair shop in Hackney would rather spend on stock. So for years the practical answer has been to post a photo and hope for the best, even though the platforms themselves, Instagram and TikTok in particular, have made no secret of pushing video into people’s feeds ahead of still images.
What has changed in the last twelve months is that the gap between a photograph and a short video has narrowed to a single upload.
How it actually works
The tools in question are usually described as image-to-video generators. The idea is simple enough: you give the software a still photograph and, optionally, a sentence describing what should happen, and it produces a short clip, typically between five and ten seconds, in which the scene moves. Steam rises off a coffee. A curtain shifts in a breeze. A camera appears to glide slowly across a shopfront that was, in reality, photographed on a phone from the pavement opposite.
One example we looked at, an Image to Video AI service called Stivio, lets a user drop in a photo, type a short prompt and download the result within a couple of minutes. The first clip is free, and beyond that it runs on a credit system, with paid plans starting at under twenty pounds a month once currency conversion is taken into account. It is not the only product doing this. Adobe and Canva both offer versions, and there are a dozen smaller services competing on price and quality. But the process is broadly the same across all of them, and that process is what matters for a small trader: no camera, no tripod, no editing software, no afternoon lost to it.
Who is using it in London
We spoke informally to a handful of business owners across the capital about how they are using this kind of software, and the answers were more mundane, and more convincing, than the usual technology hype.
An independent estate agent in Clapham told us that the firm now routinely turns listing photographs into short walk-through clips for its social accounts. “We have hundreds of professional photos of properties already,” the owner said. “Turning six of them into a thirty-second reel that looks like a slow camera move through the flat is the difference between fifteen views and fifteen hundred.” The photos, crucially, had already been paid for.
A bakery in Walthamstow uses it to animate product shots taken on a phone: a loaf on a board, a tray of cinnamon buns, a cross-section of a sourdough. The clips go up in the morning before the shop opens. The owner’s view was blunt. “I am not going to learn to edit video. I have got to be at the oven at four in the morning.”
A vintage furniture dealer trading out of a railway arch in Bermondsey has taken a slightly different approach, using the software to give still photographs of chairs and sideboards a gentle rotating movement for online listings. Buyers, she said, are noticeably more likely to enquire about a piece when they have seen it from more than one angle, even a synthetic one.
None of these people would describe themselves as technical. All of them said the same thing in different ways: the photographs were already there, and the video would otherwise never have been made.
The obvious caveats
It would be dishonest to pretend the results are flawless. The software is guessing at motion it cannot see, and it sometimes guesses badly. Hands and faces remain a weak point across most of these tools, which is why the businesses making the best use of them tend to point the camera at objects, rooms and food rather than at people. Text in a photograph can warp. A shopfront sign may come out slightly wrong on the third attempt and perfectly on the fourth.
There is also the question of honesty. A short animated clip of a bakery counter is one thing. A “walk-through” of a flat that implies a room is larger or brighter than it really is would be a different matter, and estate agents in particular are already bound by rules on misleading marketing. The agent we spoke to in Clapham said the firm treats the clips as “moving photographs” rather than as a substitute for a real viewing, and labels them as such.
And there is the cost of credits, which can creep up if a business gets carried away. Most services offer a free trial of some sort, and the sensible approach is to test a few photographs before committing to a plan.
What it means for the high street
The broader point is not really about one piece of software. It is that a task which used to require either money or a spare afternoon now requires neither, and that shifts who gets to play. For the past decade, the businesses that looked polished online were the ones that could afford to. A chain with a marketing department could produce a video a day; the independent café two doors down could not.
That advantage has not disappeared, but it has shrunk. A trader in Deptford with a decent phone and a stack of product photos can now put something in front of customers that would have looked like an agency job three years ago. Whether that translates into footfall is, of course, a different question, and one that London’s independents will answer for themselves over the next year or two.
For now, the sign of the times is a small one. On a wet Thursday afternoon in Walthamstow, a baker who has never edited a video in her life uploaded a photograph of a fruit loaf, typed “steam rising, slow zoom”, and went back to the oven. By the time the tray came out, the clip had two hundred views.
