How To Convert Live Photos to GIF Format in iPhone 6S

Since the iPhone 6s has made its place in the international news, almost every potential buyer is waiting for one feature to try – the live photos. The live photos that Apple will be providing in the new iPhones are limited to iOS9 users only. However, the GIFs can be enjoyed by anyone. Live photos can be seen as the amalgamation of pictures and videos that users can capture on the classy new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. All you need to do is hold on to the still image so it can start recording the live photo of 1.5 seconds before and after.

The adversary is that they can only be seen on Macs with OS X El Capitan or Apple devices that run iOS9. Getty Images and Facebook have already started working on support to these live photos and some other third party tools are also expected till the Christmas this year. If you’re on Android, you can also enjoy Live Photos Alternatives For Android.

Till that doesn’t happen, you can share the video portion of live photos on different Android devices and PCs along with sharing it on Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter.

Method # 1 – Connect Phone to Mac & Copy the File

The mechanism behind making of these live photos is actually a secret. What we know is they are actually a mixture of a JPG and a MOV file attached together. If you want to share these live photos through email or other methods, the recipient will not be able to see the video if the device is not compatible with iOS9. If you need to separate the MOV and JPG files, you will have to plug your phone into a Mac and then select Image Capture.

This option will show the two files individually. The MOV file that you want will be located easily which can be moved to your computer. Now convert the .mov file to .gif using any third party tool or app, like GIF Brewery.

Method # 2 – Convert Live Photos as GIF

In addition, if you only care about the movement in live photos and not the music, then there is one more hack that you may use. Connect your iPhone 6S with a Macbook and go to the Quick Time Player. Select File and then New Movie Recording. Press and hold the Live Photo that you want to extract from and choose the record button once you have selected your iPhone as the source.

After all these steps, now you are the owner of the video file which will be runnable on almost any device from Mac to Windows. A GIF does not contain audio but the video file does. You can share this file anywhere you want; on social platforms, through email and texts. The file may not be too large in size to create any problem with the sending process.

In order to convert live photos to GIF, you need to go through a very simple step, pick a great GIF converter or maker. TThe live videos extracted from live photos are usually layered with 14 frames per second which can be seen as a goof starting point to convert live photos into GIF format. You can find dozens of tool, check Zamzar online conversion.

Live photos to GIF conversion may be a lot easier but the converted files are actually very large and need to be shrunk down. The size may start from 10 MB to 20 MB which is quite a big size for sending purposes. In order to shrink these GIFs, you need to decrease the pixel density and bring it down as much as possible. You could use any online tool for photo compression, like, Compressor.io, GIFMaker.me, EZGif. Another way of doing this is by reducing the number of color or by trimming the length of the converted GIF using any photo editing tool like Photoshop.