How to create gifs of Live Photos and share them to Instagram and Facebook
- sep
- 25
Until apps support them, the giffery has to be done. It is known.
Apple's Live Photos may not be movies or still images, but they bear a great resemblance to another great fad of our time: gifs. And until app developers build support for Live Photos in their apps, the only way to share a Live Photo to a non-Messages social network will be in gif or movie form.
Luckily, if you have a computer and Lightning cable nearby, it's pretty easy to turn a Live Photo into a bonafide Instagram video or gif. Here's what you need to do.
How to turn a Live Photo into a gif
- Connect your iPhone to your Mac via its Lightning-to-USB cable.
- Open Image Capture.
- Each Live Photo is saved as a JPEG and a MOV file. Select the MOV files of the Live Photo you want to transform and download them to your Desktop.
- Open the MOV file in your GIF-creator of choice. (I love GifBrewery, personally, but there are plenty of free gif-making services on the web.)
How to share a Live Photo to Facebook
- Follow steps 1-4 in the previous how-to and make a gif on the service of your choice.
- Upload your gif to Giphy if your gif service doesn't already provide you with a URL.
- Share the URL on whatever Facebook page you want.
How to share a Live Photo to Instagram
- Follow steps 1-3 in the previous how-to, but don't use gif-making software.
- Open AirDrop on both your Mac and iPhone. (If you don't know how to use AirDrop, here's a quick primer.)
- AirDrop the MOV video(s) you want to share from your Mac to your iPhone.
- The Live Photo will now show up as a video in the Photos app. Open Instagram and do with it what you will!
Questions? Comments?
Found a better way of sharing and giffing Live Photos than this work-around? Let us know in the comments.
