Review: Export your iPhone’s Live Photos with LIVE GIF

One of the spiffy new features of iOS 9 and the iPhone 6S models is Live Photos. When enabled, a Live Photo also captures the 1.5 seconds both before and after the shutter snaps. The end result is a slick little, Harry Potter-style, magic dynamic moving photo that you can view with a press in your iPhone’s Photos app.

Unfortunately, you can’t save or share the magical Live Photo. Sharing from your iPhone or viewing in Photos for Mac OS only shows you the single, full resolution key shot.

Until Apple creates its own solution, Live GIF by Priime ($1.99) bridges that gap and lets you easily export and share Live photos as an animated GIF or short video.

Using Live GIF to Save Live Photos

Converting a Live Photo is extremely quick, easy, and straightforward. The Open screen of Live GIF only shows any Live Photos you have in your iPhone’s camera roll, a great feature which potentially saves a lot of guesswork, frustration, and cussing. The app gives you the option of either converting to an Animated GIF or a video. Select one to save or share. Slick and easy.

The converted files are about 3 seconds long. Animated GIFs have 60 looping frames and are saved at 480×360 pixels resolution. They weigh in at about 2-3 MB which is small enough to share with most social media networks. Video is higher quality and is saved at 1440×1080 pixels resolution (1080P) at 20 frames per second with sound. Video files sizes are about 3-4 MB each. Both types of files render about as smooth as the Live Photo preview which is “meh” quality.

But what bugs me about Live GIF….

The app also gives you the opportunity to edit the photo in their flagship photo app Priime (Free, with in-app purchases), a very good one-tap photo filter app that I like a lot. I was initially excited about this app link thinking how cool it would be to apply effects to the entire Live Photo.

Unfortunately, all it does is take you to the Priime open screen where you can import the static, high-res key frame like any other photo.

Without the functionality to edit the entire 60 frames, this feature does more harm than good by working one frame. If the object is to get users to download Priime, I think they are better off simply putting an ad on the splash screen. Personally, I’d rather see Priime be able to edit the entire Live Photo clip. That would be slick!

The previous version of Live GIF saved animated GIFs at a larger 640×480 pixels. Unfortunately, this created file sizes which were larger than Twitter’s 5 MB file size cap. To fix that, the latest release gets the file size down under that cap but at the expense of a lot of pixels in an already-small image. What about giving users the option to choose between smaller file size or higher image quality? One star off for this. Until this is fixed, at least there’s the option of saving at the much higher resolution video format. So there’s that.

The Bottom Line

Overall, I give a reluctant recommendation for Live GIF. It’s a fast, easy solution to getting a form of your Live Photos off of your device to archive or share. Currently, along with another photo app Lively, it’s one of the only solutions at this time. I’ll like Live GIF a lot more when we get back our higher resolution output. If they can ever seamlessly and fully link this app to Priime, I’ll be one of its biggest evangelists.

Compatibility: Requires iOS 9.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, iPad Air, iPad Air Wi-Fi + Cellular, iPad mini 2, iPad mini 2 Wi-Fi + Cellular, iPad Air 2, iPad Air 2 Wi-Fi + Cellular, iPad mini 3, iPad mini 3 Wi-Fi + Cellular, iPad mini 4, iPad mini 4 Wi-Fi + Cellular, iPad Pro, iPad Pro Wi-Fi + Cellular, and iPod touch (6th generation).

Download Live GIF

App Store link: Live GIF – Priime, Inc.

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