By Dan Moren

October 15, 2015 8:51 AM PT

Live GIF is iOS’s first Live Photo to GIF converter

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Apple didn’t so much as utter the word “GIF”¹ when it unveiled Live Photos last month, but come on: we were all thinking it. Unfortunately, Live Photos are a proprietary format, so though the company also assured us it was working with partners, including Facebook, to support Live Photos, in the meantime, you can only share your moving pictures with other folks on iOS and OS X.

Still, it seemed inevitable that somebody would take it upon themselves to make a way to convert Live Photos into GIFs, and, sure enough, Priime has done just that with its new $2 Live GIF app for iOS.

Live GIF is about as simple as it can get: launch it and you’ll see all of the Live Photos you’ve taken. There’s no searching, filtering, or organization—just a grid of thumbnails starting at the most recent and going back.

Tap any Live Photo and you’ll be taken to a preview screen where it’s converted to an animated GIF. You can then share it either as a GIF (with no sound) or a video, via iOS’s standard Share sheet.

However, I did encounter some limitations: for example, I couldn’t share directly to Twitter from Live GIF; it just didn’t show up as an option in the Share sheet. Instead I had to save the GIF back to my Camera Roll and then upload it from Tweetbot. (I could have also gone to Photos and shared it to Twitter directly from there.)

There’s also no editing, so what you took is what you get. So no trimming all those Live Photos that end with shots of your shoes—yeah, you know what I’m talking about. (You could presumably save it as a video to your Camera Roll, open it in iMovie or another video-editing app, trim it there, and save it once again, but that’d better be a heck of a Live Photo.) Nor can you tweak the export settings for the GIF or video: it’s one quality fits all.

I’m sure Live GIF won’t be the last Live-Photo-to-GIF option out there, but it does seem to be the first, and that’s no small thing. So if you’ve been waiting to post your Live Photos to Twitter or Instagram, you’re just $2 away.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]

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