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Apple's new Live Photos feature turns your pictures into videos

Apple's new Live Photos feature turns your pictures into videos

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Phil Schiller announced a few new iPhone camera tricks at today's Apple event, but one of the strangest was something called "Live Photos." Think of it as a something between automatic GIFs and short video clips.

Read next: The iPhone 6S and 6S Plus review.

Every picture you take with the new iPhone 6S or 6S Plus is, by default, also a Live Photo. The camera app captures a second and a half on either side of the photo that you take, and when you tap the photo it will animate. (It will also animate as you're swiping between photos in your camera roll.) So you still get the 12-megapixel still image that you snapped, but you also get a little bit extra.

Every photo you take will also be a Live Photo

Apple says that Live Photos will be supported across all Apple products, showed off being used as wallpaper on your iPhone or Apple Watch. It's not necessarily a new idea — HTC did this with its "Zoe" camera mode, and others have tried similar feats — but Apple has the advantage of building Live Photos into one of the world's most popular phones (and cameras).

It's important to remember that the new iPhones have a bigger sensor this time around (12 megapixels), and Live Photos is likely to take up more space than a normal picture, so you're likely going to fill the phone's storage space much faster this time around. Add in that these new iPhones can shoot 4K footage, and that makes the most affordable 16GB iPhone an even harder sell than it already was.

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