Live Photos seen in a gallery or on a user’s wall – they’ll also have the bullseye symbol – can be played either by Force Touch pressing on the iPhone 6s, or by tapping and holding on an earlier iPhone or iPad running iOS 9.
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Besides Facebook and Tumblr, Getty Images is also offering a selection of Live Photos through its app. It’s a curated selection, though, rather than a mechanism for sharing photos with friends. A bigger rollout is expected in the beginning of next year.
Apple is extremely proud of the new photo format, which can be viewed on any device running iOS 9 or OS X El Capitan and higher – but only captured only the latest iPhones.
The addition of Facebook’s Live Photos builds on Tumblr’s recent support for Live Photos in its own iOS app.
Look for the concentric Live Photo circle in the corner.
Add a caption, as you normally would, and then click Post.
‘A still photo captures an instant frozen in time, ‘ explained Apple. With Live Photos, you always get the video option unless you turn the feature off. When you snap a shot, the phone saves a second and a half of video leading to that shot and continues recording until you get three seconds in all.
You’ll have to tap that box manually with each Live Photo, and with good reason: once enabled on your iPhone, Live Photos are created with little to no thought on your part.
On the iPhone 6s, Live Photos can additionally be set as a person’s Lock Screen wallpaper or as their watch face on Apple Watch.
This makes the camera better equipped to deal with shakes and movement, and forms the basis of the camera’s stablisation feature.
Third-party apps are finally integrating the animated Live Photos that can only be taken using the iPhone 6s.
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According to statistics from November, more than 1.39 billion people now use Facebook on a mobile device, and it’s estimated that almost 36,000 images are uploaded to the site every minute.
