How to save as a live photo

You’ve been able to save a single Live Photo as a still image on your iPhone for quite some time. But did you know you can just as easily make a short video from a Live Photo and even stitch together multiple Live Photos to create a single mini-video of your memories!

Live Photo to video

Saving Live Photos as a video was introduced as part of the iOS 13 and iPadOS software updates first previewed at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference held in the summer of 2019. Frankly, it should have been available from the start, but better late than never, I guess. Before, you had to use a third-party app to turn multiple Live Photos into a single video.

Live Photos require iPhone 6s or later, fifth-generation iPad or newer, third-generation iPad Air or later, fifth-generation iPad mini or later, any iPad Pro model, or the seventh-generation iPod touch.

How to export Live Photos as video

iOS 13, iPadOS, and later let you export a single Live Photo as a video file or stitch together multiple Live Photos to create a single video. Read on for the full description of both of these methods.

Export a single Live Photo as a video

Here’s how to save a Live Photo as a video:

1) Open the Photos app on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

2) Select the Albums tab from the bottom.

3) Scroll down and tap Live Photos under Media Types.

4) Choose a Live Photo you’d like to save as a video.

5) Tap the Share button.

6) Scroll down and choose Save as Video.

Find your newly created video in the Recents album in Photos. The video is saved with the timestamp of the creation date. The Live Photo remains in the Photos app until deleted.

Each Live Photo results in a two-second video, but your mileage may vary as I’ve seen longer and shorter Live Photo videos as well. This will not work if only the Live Photo’s still image is enabled or if your Live Photo has a motion effect like Loop, Bounce, or Long Exposure.

In the case of the former, open the Live Photo and tap Edit. Hit the Live Photo icon at the bottom and tap the label “LIVE” at the top, so it turns yellow. Finally, tap Done to save changes.

If one of your Live Photos has a motion effect applied to it, like Bounce, tap it and choose Live.

Export multiple Live Photos as a video

Saving multiple Live Photos as a single video is a nice and easy way to quickly create a showreel of sorts or a dynamic video based on the recent trip you took.

Follow the steps below to combine many Live Photos into a video:

1) Open the Photos app and tap Albums.

2) Scroll down and tap Live Photos underneath the Media Types heading.

3) Tap Select, then choose all the Live Photos you’d like turned into a single video.

Note: In its documentation, Apple says that you must select consecutive Live Photos. In my experience, the selected Live Photos don’t have to be related or successive.

4) Tap the Share button.

5) Scroll down and choose Save as Video.

All of the Live Photos you selected will be turned into a single video that gets saved in the Recents album on your iPhone and iPad. Live Photo conversion is non-destructible, meaning that any Live Photos you’ve saved as a video remain in the Photos app until you delete them manually.

Keep in mind that those videos cannot exist next to their related Live Photos events because they’re saved with the timestamp of the creation date instead of the last Live Photo.

As mentioned, if you don’t see the Save as Video action in the Share sheet, that’s because one of the selected Live Photos has the motion effect applied to it, like Bounce, Loop, or Long Exposure.

In 2015, Apple Harry Potter-ized our pics with the introduction of photos-as-moving-pictures, aka "live photos."

Live photos capture three seconds of video in total, with one and a half seconds recorded both before and after the shutter clicks. To view the whole sequence, you just press and hold the live photo. You'd think this would be a video, but it's actually a High Efficiency Image File (HEIF) format; the file automatically selects one still as the lead image. But what if you want to share the whole sequence of moving images on a device other than a smartphone, or as a .GIF?

To do this, you need to convert a live photo into a video. This previously required downloading a third party Shortcut, such as the Convert LivePhotos to Video shortcut. You could also use another third party app to turn live photos into .GIFs: Twitter introduced this in 2019.

However, Apple made this transformation even easier with the release of iOS 13 in 2019, no shortcuts or external apps required.

Here's how to convert your live photos into a video using just your iPhone.

1. Open the Photos app and select your Live Photo

You'll know it's a live photo if it says "LIVE" with an image of concentric circles in the upper let hand corner.

2. Press the "Share" button in the lower left hand corner

3. Scroll down to the option that says "Save as Video."

And smash that button!

4. Return to "Recents" or "Albums" in the Photos app, and scroll down to the most recent image.

Et voila, your live video will reappear as a video, in the most recent photo position. From there, you can share the video wherever you want to, and even convert it into a .GIF. Here's the full spectrum of emotions my dog goes through while being bribed with a treat, for example.

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