What at first seemed like a minor feature has quickly exploded in popularity thanks to a variety of social media platforms announcing plans to support Apple’s new animated Live Photo file format. And now you can turn those animated Live Photos photos into universal GIFs with the help of a new iOS app called Lively.
There are a few similar applications already available on the Apple App Store, but Tiny Whale’s Lively seems to be the simplest and most versatile released so far. Through Lively, users are able to turn their Live Photos into GIFs or videos and control the speed the file plays at, ranging from o.5x to 2.0x.
With the launch of Apple’s iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, Apple also released a new feature that, when turned on, captures a few seconds before and after each photograph is taken. These frames are then stitched together to form an animated file closely resembling a short GIF.
But since this feature is only supported by the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, actually sharing Live Photos is limited to devices running iOS 9 or OS X El Capitan.
This is a problem Lively hopes to solve with its simple Live Photo to GIF conversion.
It’s important to point out since Apple has made Live Photos’ API available to developers in iOS 9.1, apps like Lively are essentially a stopgap measure until developers begin integrating native Live Photo support into their applications. It likely won’t be long before we see Live Photos integrated into social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram.
Up to three Live Photos can be exported for free and after that the app costs $2.29.
[source]Tech Crunch[/source]
