by Jason Snell
Motion Stills
The other day John Nack, formerly of Adobe and currently of Google, dropped me a note about Google’s new app, Motion Stills, which processes the Live Photos taken by the iPhone 6S and turns them into motion-stabilized GIFs or videos. Google posted about it with some samples on its research blog, and John posted even more on his blog.
I’ve been using it the last couple of days, and I’m impressed. Really impressed. The Live Photos feature of iOS 9 felt incomplete on the day it shipped, and many of the gaps haven’t been filled in yet. Sprucing up Live Photos didn’t make my iOS Wish List, but with this app, Google shows Apple how it should be done: Automatic motion stabilization plus “loop optimization” to set the best start and end points.
Bottom line: Motion Stills makes me want to use Live Pictures more often, because the results are so much better. Something like this needs to be a feature of iOS 10. In the meantime, I’m going to use Motion Stills to process every Live Photo I want to share.