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Still photos are great, but there's no doubt that a GIF is way better for capturing a memorable scene or someone's emotions. But until today, creating and sharing GIFs took a varying amount of effort, especially when you wanted to take one of your iPhone 6s Live Photos and turn it into a sharable GIF.
Thanks to Google's new Motion Stills app, launching today on the App Store, you can turn any Live Photo into an instantly shareable GIF in seconds.
To take a Live Photo, iPhone 6s owners just snap a photo like normal — as long as the circular icon at the top of the screen is highlighted in yellow (if not, tap to switch it on), the phone will record a couple seconds before and after you tap the shutter button. Then, in your Camera Roll, you hold your finger on that photo and it moves like a GIF.
The problem, though, is that as cool as Live Photos are, you can't edit them or easily share them as GIFs on Instagram, on their own. But Motion Stills makes it incredibly easy to export that Live Photo as a GIF, to anyone.
The app doesn't only let you share the "motion" of your Live Photos on Instagram, Facebook, and other social networks; it also works like a camera tripod to stabilize the scene so that there's no shaky camera motion. The result is a GIF that looks like it was shot using a professional, high-tech camera. You also have the option to combine multiple Live Photos into a short video clip.
Click through to check out some cool examples of Motion Stills in action.
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