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Google Motion Stills update fixes yet another thing about Apple’s Live Photos

Google Motion Stills update fixes yet another thing about Apple’s Live Photos

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Google Motion Stills

Motion Stills, the excellent Google app for iOS that stabilizes iPhone Live Photos and lets you share them as GIFs and videos, has a new update out that fixes another annoyance with Apple’s occasionally useful camera feature. 

Have you ever taken a Live Photo where the canonical “main” frame just isn’t the one you wanted? Where your subject’s expression was captured at the least flattering nanosecond, for instance, or where rapidly changing ambient light shrouded your photo in darkness at just the wrong time?

Motion Stills now fixes that by letting you choose any frame from your Live Photo and re-export it with that frame as the primary image. You can scroll through each captured frame with a simple slider, and the exported image works like any other Live Photo — but now you don’t always have to 3D Touch the screen to see the moment you wanted.

There is a catch. For space reasons, Live Photos only save the primary frame in full 12-megapixel clarity, with the other frames handled as lower-resolution video; choosing one of these frames will therefore result in a photo with less detail than the original. But since the vast majority of Live Photo viewing probably happens on phones, this may not be a major issue for you.

If you ever shoot Live Photos and you haven’t downloaded Motion Stills yet, it’s well worth doing so right away. As ever, the features work retroactively with all the Live Photos that are already in your library; the single scrolling stream is getting a little unwieldy at this point, but perhaps that’s something for a future update.