Google's new iPhone app will fix your blurry Live Photos
Remember Apple's Live Photos, the GIF-like images that capture a bit of motion in addition to your still image? Well, they are about to get a whole lot better,
Google just introduced a new app that not only fixes your Live Photos but turns them into GIFs or video clips so you can share them more easily.
Called Motion Stills, the iPhone app stabilizes the Live Photos by freezing the background of the image so that only the motion at the center of the frame is captured. The result is that choppy or blurry Live Photos are transformed into smooth clips that are much more compelling (and shareable.)
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You can see the difference in the clip below, which shows a Live Photo before and after being put through the app.
You can also use the app to combine multiple Live Photos into one image. Once you've created a clip, you can save it as a GIF or a video clip to make it easier to share on social media.
The app is actually the result of quite an impressive bit of engineering from Google's research team.
"We pioneered this technology by stabilizing hundreds of millions of videos and creating GIF animations from photo bursts," Google writes on its Research Blog. "Our approach identifies optimal start and end points, and also discards blurry frames. As an added benefit, this fixes “pocket shots” (footage of the phone being put back into the pocket)."
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Despite being one of the hallmark features of the iPhone 6S, Apple's Live Photos haven't caught on as much as the company may have hoped. The format has proven tricky to master and third parties have been slow to support the feature (though a few major networks, like Tumblr and Facebook, have jumped on board.)
But Motion Stills manages to tackle both of these issues and does so in an extremely lightweight way (the app doesn't require an Internet connection or login of any kind -- though it does leave a small watermark on GIFs you create.) Better still, it gives you a reason to go back to all the Live Photos you've previously shot and give them a second look -- you may find that some are worth sharing after all.
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Karissa was Mashable's Senior Tech Reporter, and is based in San Francisco. She covers social media platforms, Silicon Valley, and the many ways technology is changing our lives. Her work has also appeared in Wired, Macworld, Popular Mechanics, and The Wirecutter. In her free time, she enjoys snowboarding and watching too many cat videos on Instagram. Follow her on Twitter @karissabe.
