Live Photos tips: What are Live Photos?
Live Photos captures a second and a half of audio and video before and after you press the shutter for Harry Potter-like moving photos (that are actually low frame rate, 15fps videos).Live Photos tips: Which Apple devices can take Live Photos?
Only the iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus can take Live Photos.You can use Live Photos with both the rear and front facing camera of those phones.
Live Photos tips: How to take a Live Photo
Open up the Camera app and Enable Live Photos by tapping the icon that looks like a bull’s eye at the top of the screen (between HDR and timer) it will turn yellow when it’s on.Some reviewers have claimed Live Photos was on by default when they first used their iPhone 6s/6s Plus, but that wasn’t our experience.
There are a few things to be aware of when taking Live Photos. The second and a half of video starts actually before you press the button, so make sure you already have the shot in frame before pressing the shutter button or part of you photo will be you framing the shot. At the other end of the shot there’s another second and a half of video being taken so don’t click and immediately turn the phone towards the ground.
Live Photos tips: What level of quality do Live Photos offer, and how much storage space do Live Photos take up?
Live Photos taken with the rear-facing camera on the 6s and 6s Plus are 12-megapixels. If you take Live Photos with the front facing camera it will be 5-megapixels.When we imported Live Photos via Image Capture on a Mac we could see that each of the Live Photos is made up of a .mov file of around 3-4MB and a jpg of about 2-5.4MB. In most cases the video file was larger than the jpg, but there were a few cases where the jpg was bigger, we’re not at all sure why that would be the case. Normal photos are 1-2MB so the fact that these jpgs are larger suggests that they include more information than just the still image. An image taken on another iPhone 6s that was messaged to us weighed in at 4.6MB.
Live Photos tips: How to view Live Photos
Once you have taken a live photo you can view it in the Photos app on your phone (or tap the thumb nail of the image you’ve just taken in the bottom left corner to be taken straight to it).Open the image and hard press on the photo to play it. We found that if you swiped to the next Live Photo it would play a few microseconds, but if you press throughout the playback you will see more of the recording. There appears to be no way to edit the final version even though this footage that is unseen by default it there.
You can view live Photos on other Apple devices running iOS 9 or Macs running OS X El Capitan. To view a Live Photo on an older iPhone or an iPad, use a long press to play the ‘video’. The problem with this is that your finger will obscure the photo you are playing.
We expected to be able to view Live Photos on an Apple Watch running watchOS 2, but unfortunately they only way to view it as a Live Photo was by setting the photo as a watch face. Pressing a photo in the Photos app on the watch didn't activate motion. This remains the case on the Apple Watch Series 2 and watchOS 3.
It is straightforward to view any Live Photos on a Mac running El Capitan in Photos and Preview. Just click on the image.
Live Photos tips: How to find Live Photos on your iPhone
If you open the Photos app intending to view your Live Photos you may be surprised that there is no obvious way to determine if an image is Live or not. For reasons best known to Apple, the company hasn’t added a Live Photos album like it has for other photo categories.Some reviewers suggest that there is a circular icon to identify Live Photos, but we didn’t see that on our phone, apart from when we had selected a photo for sharing, in that view we could see the Live icon.
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