Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter/Magic/Photograph

Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter - Magic
Photograph
Type	Device
Features	Animate images
First Appearance	Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Overview

Magical photographs are similar to Muggle photographs, except that the people portrayed in them are animate, moving, waving, and apparently dropping out of the picture occasionally to attend to other business. They act in many ways as their originator would in similar situation: a photograph of a girl develops spots on her nose at one point and starts trying to hide her face under the picture frame, for instance.

Extended Description

While very similar to magical Paintings, photographs seem to be lesser variants of the breed; while the characters are animate, they do not seem to interact with occupants of other photos, and they do not seem to interact much with the people outside the photograph (in fact, they don't seem to be able to speak at all) – although in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Alastor Moody does instruct the characters in a photograph to "move aside", and they apparently do so. Printed images behave similarly to photographs; the pictures in The Daily Prophet, for instance, move but don't speak either.