Pieces already comes with 300 ready-to-use animations grouped into three sets, IN (with fade-in effect), OUT (with fade-out effect) and MID (without fading effect). Check it out.
Pieces can be used both with javascript and html. So images can be animated with awesome effects simply adding some html attributes to your html <img> tags like this:
<img src="IMG_PATH" pi-mouseover="pieces109,50,50,0,reverse,false">
Pieces is also available for Wordpress. Check it out