10 Uses For iPhone Live Photos

Live Photos are more than just a bit of video attached to your pictures. You can use them to create loops, long exposures and pick a perfect frame when your subject won't stay still.

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at some uses for Live Photos. 
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So when you have Live Photos turned on on your iPhone and you take a photo you actually capturing everything from 1½ seconds before you took the photo to 1½ seconds after you took the photo. You turned it on with this little button here in the upper right hand corner. If that's on you'll see it will indicate live there for a second and you're taking a live photo. To turn it Off you tap there again to turn it off. So when you turn it On it is actually recording from the camera while you're moving your iPhone around. When you take the shot it actually uses the last 1½ seconds and the next 1½ seconds and records all of that. It's not as simple as a photo and then some video around it. It's actually a photo and then the changes for each frame before and after it. So each frame of this 3 seconds is actually it's own individual photo with all the pixels there. This makes it extremely useful in a number of ways. So I'm going to look at using this on the Mac in the Photos App but you can do most of this in the Photos App on your iPhone as well. 
So here you could see I've got a Live Photo and it says so at the upper left hand corner. If I move my pointer over it it actually plays that video including sound! Now it will just play it through once and I can move my pointer off and move it back on again to get it to play again. But that's not all it does. One of the things you could do is you could take all this video and you could turn it into a loop. So I'll go to Edit here and under the Adjust tab there you'll see the options at the bottom left hand corner. I can switch from Live to Loop. What Loop will do is it will turn the entire thing into a loop. Now notice how it zoomed in a bit. What it is going to do is not just loop the video. It's much more than that. It is actually stabilizing the video. It's looking at some of the items around here, like the rocks, and it's stabilizing the entire thing. Otherwise you would just get this jittery kind of loop. So you get the running water here at the bottom. You get the continuously flowing waterfall. It actually fades the end of the 3 seconds back into the beginning. It works great for water!
So here's another photo and there's actually no big waterfall or anything in this. But if I move my pointer over the Live there you can see how the water is rippling as water does. You could also see how I'm moving around a lot. I'm not on a tripod. I'm just holding this with my hand. So if I go in here and I change this to Loop notice how it will stabilize everything so the statue and the background are stable. But the water ripples and fades in and it looks like the water is just continuously flowing or reacting to the breeze here and it creates this kind of nice moving image. Even the traffic here in the background seems to kind of work in this case. 
But another option is Long Exposure. Let's go here and change instead of to Loop to Long Exposure. It's going to stabilize just like before. So it zooms in a little bit. But then it is going to take all the frames of the moving parts, in this case the water, and it's going to create a long exposure effect. So what you get here is the equivalent to a long exposure except you don't need the tripod. This is handheld. Everything else is stabilized. The running water parts are using all the different frames to create the long exposure effect. 
Now another aspect of the Live Photos is that when you go to Edit, and you're in Adjust here, you've got the entire 3 seconds of video here. So you can go back and forward and choose any frame out of these. Remember it's remembering the differences between the frames. So it is not like this frame here is a photo and this is just part of lower resolution video. Not at all. You can reassign the main photo to be any one of these frames. This helps a lot when you're photographing, say, animals because animals aren't going to stand there and pose perfectly for you and wait for you to take the photo. So you can, instead, sample three seconds of reality and take the shot that actually makes the most sense. So you may find like this is the better show. Or maybe something along here. Then I can simply click Make Key Photo and that's now the regular photo. The one that I would see if I would look at this as a still image or share it or print it. 
So getting a photo like this of my dog, it seems like he just posed for it. But in fact, of course, he is doing this during the entire 3 seconds and I was able to capture all of this and grab just the perfect frame. Or maybe I decide that this is the perfect frame. Anyway I want to do it I can reassign the Key Photo. By the way if you want to grab multiple frames as photos you can. So I can take this one here, go to Image and then Duplicate one photo. When I do that with a Live Photo it's going to give me the option to Duplicate As a Still Photo. So I can take this frame out as a regular photo. Go in and pick a new Key Frame and then do that again to get another photo from that same single Live Photo. 
Of course this also works for humans. We've all been in the situation where we pose for a photo, maybe taking a selfie, and we're not quite sure exactly how to smile or look or point our eyes. Anything like that. So you can do a Live Photo and get something like this and you could see how I'm moving my head around and I can go in here later on and Adjust to get the perfect shot of myself. That works particularly well if the person isn't posing. Like say you're at a gathering and you want to take a picture of your friends. You don't want to ask them to stop what they are doing and pose for a photo. So maybe you take a picture of your friends talking and use a Live Photo that gives you 3 seconds worth of images to be able to get the perfect one where nobody is blinking or has their mouth half open. That kind of thing. 
This also works great for other objects that continue to animate. For instance, here we've got a fire. So you can grab the best version here with the best bit of flame. Flags are another great example. When traveling I love to take pictures of flags especially on beautiful days when they are waving in the wind. But you usually end up with something like that. Or something like that. But when using Live Photos you have a large number of different frames to get a perfect sample from. Fireworks are another great way to use Live Photos. Not only do you actually get a little sample of the fireworks with the sound but you can kind of find the perfect frame to choose from. Or you could use one of these. You could have a Loop and then it just makes it look like fireworks just going on all the time. You can use a Long Exposure and it doesn't work particularly great for this photo but sometimes for a large firework going off filling the sky it does. Amusement parks are another great place to use this when trying to catch a friend going by on a roller coaster or on a merry-go-round or something like that you can use a live photo to get like the perfect shot. 
I've saved the best for last. Live Photos let you easily take pictures of lightning. In the past in order to take pictures of lightening you basically had to sit there with your camera ready to go poised and as soon as you see that lightening you take the shot as quickly as you can and hope you were fast enough. But with Live Photos you're grabbing the frames from 1½ seconds before. So you just casually stand there with your iPhone, point it at the sky and when you see it light up you click the shutter button. Then you can go back into time and forward in time and find that frame that actually shows the lightening. Sometimes you get several different frames and looks pretty cool. Thanks to the modern iPhone's ability to take really good night shots you can easily capture lightening using Live Photos. 
I'm going to leave you with a couple of tips. If you ever want to use those three seconds of a Live Photo as a video, say in an iMovie Project, you can go to File, Export, and then Export Unmodified Original. Then export it somewhere. Let's go and just export this to the Desktop. Then what you're going to get is the still frame, the one chosen as the primary frame there, but also a video. 
Now another tip is if you want to Share these as a GIF you can. The Mac version of Photos makes this easy. First you have to remember to Set it to Loop or Bounce. This won't work if it is set to Live. So, change it to Loop first, then you go to File, and then under Export you have Export GIF. You can export a GIF version of this. Here it is on the Desktop and you can see it's a little looping animated GIF that now most social media networks and sharing it in an email and all of that will make it work like a video. 
There are lot of other little reasons to use Live Photos. For instance, you get that little bit of audio so if you just want to remember kind of the flavor of what's going on in the room at the time then that's really helpful. Say a party or a concert or something like that. Also they are really useful for taking blind photos. Like if you have to use your iPhone around a corner or hold it at an odd angle and you can't really see what it is your photographing taking a Live Photo and kind of gently moving your phone a little bit as you take the photo, not too quickly, then you have a better chance of actually getting the photo you're aiming for. 
So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 15 Responses to “10 Uses For iPhone Live Photos”

Carl Martinoli

2 years ago

Always something to learn from your broadcasts, and this was one of your best. Opens up a whole new set of processes to explore. We sure have come a long way since the //GS!

Thanks, Carl M.

Rick

Is there a way to remove the audio from a Live Photo? or, are there edits (covering to gif, looping, etc) that automatically do not include the audio?

Gary Rosenzweig

Rick: Yes. Click the audio button (bottom right, when editing the Live Photo).

Vaman Kale

I would like to include some Live Photo’s in a movie where it will run as a Live Photo for 3 secs. How to do that?

nick

Great lesson Gary. I usually have Live Photos turned off because I thought they're just accumulating extra storage for no reason. Apple should be compensating you for marketing their product better than they do :)

Vaman: I mention in the tutorial how to extract it as a video. Then just take that video clip into iMovie or whatever you are using to build your video project.

Francis X. Cottone

Gary when I airdrop the image to my iMac to use photos the live logo isn't present event though it is a live photo. I can edit on the phone but it doesn't seem to carryover to the iMac. Any suggestions. thanks

Andrea Grasselli

Thank you very much Gary, this is really useful for me! I did not think Live Photos can be soooo useful !!!

Francis: AirDropping from Photos is essentially exporting the photo as a still image like you are sharing it via a variety of other methods. If this is your iPhone and your iMac, why are you not using iCloud Photo Library? With that, this is a non-issue. Otherwise, you'll need to work with the Live Photo on your iPhone. Syncing (old-fashioned cable sync) to the Photos app on your iMac may do it too, but haven't tried that in years so I'm not sure.

Patrick

Gary, thanks for turning up the rheostat on live photos. Now I have more uses of live photos to use on different occasions.

Also,I tried to transfer live photos via Airdrop from my iPhone to my MacBook Pro. No luck. Called Apple Support and spent two hours with them trying to solve the problem. Finally, they suggested I plug in my cable and make the transfer that way. It worked!

Always something new to learn. Keep up the great work on these presentations.

Patrick: Using iCloud Photo Library would have made it a non-issue.

Dave Hunter

The "live photo" tutorial was the best example in many years of how the simple tutorials can be so valuable to those of us who are not so technically inclined. We all take "pictures" on our phone and this had some great tips about how to do it better. Great work!

Margot Wilmshurst

I have found your Live Photos can last as long as you hold and press the button.
Another question please. How do I make Live Photo off not just for the time I am photo but for the next time I turn on my camera app?

Margot : When You hold down the button you switch from photo mode to video mode. So you are taking a video there, not a Live Photo.

Arnie Keller

This is the best tutorial I’ve ever seen about live photos.

Comments Closed.

10 Uses For iPhone Live Photos

Comments: 15 Responses to “10 Uses For iPhone Live Photos”

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