When I was in high school I used to make movies with my friends. In one of the movies my friend asked if he could just rant in front of a camera for a few minutes. It’s been a while, so I don’t remember everything he ranted about, but one of the things was definitely Apple. It was more than a little ironic given that we were using an iMac and Final Cut Pro to edit and master the movie.
Without dating myself, it’s been a while since I was in high school, but my friend and I still keep in touch, and he still complains about Apple a lot. I got quite the earful when I told him I got my first iPhone back in January. He was telling me how much he liked his Samsung Galaxy and all of the ways in which it was a superior device to my iPhone.
I did laugh quite a bit when he texted me recently to say even he was getting an iPhone now because his company was deploying them. Now I’ve been trying to show him how to do things and occasionally get him riled up by waxing poetic about how great Apple is in an over-the-top, comical way.
Having friends with a different kinds of smartphones can be a little lame, because of all of the features you can’t take advantage of in Messages and other apps. Heck, even my friend with the iPhone refuses to use iMessage and just forces his phone to send via plain SMS. Google apparently wanted to remedy at least a piece of the incompatibility when it comes to sharing live photos from iOS to other places by creating an app. The app, called Motion Stills, taps into your photos library and lets you convert a live photo to an animated GIF. You can even stitch several live photos together to make one long GIF. These can then be shared with any device that can play animated GIFs (pretty much everything at this point). You can even email them, save them, post them on social media, whatever you want! Heads up though that GIFs can become HUGE really quickly. I used an online GIF optimizer tool to help reduce the size of the images in this article.
I’ll admit that at first, I thought live photos were kind of gimmicky, and I was sure I’d just end up turning the feature off. I did for a while, but now I like having it as an option. For the most part, all I ever care about is the static picture I took, but I like the depth it adds to see it moving. I recently took a picture of myself on a mountain top, and I like how I can see how windy it was with everything blowing around in the live photo. It’s very cool to see third-party apps like Motion Stills stepping in to add to the utility of live photos. Now I can share them with all of my non-iPhone friends.