Tumblr has become the first social website where you can share those fun Live Photos taken with your iPhone, following the introduction of Live Photo sharing through its app last year. The timing is fortuitous, as with the iPhone 7 and iOS 10, Apple has added new editing features to Live Photos, so you can ensure the pictures you do post look great.
Identifying Live Pictures on Tumblr is similar to doing so in the Camera Roll on the iPhone. Just look out for the circular icon in the top corner. However, while 3D Touch is used to animate Live Photos on the iPhone, that’s obviously not going to work elsewhere. To see the picture in all its glory on Tumblr, just click and hold.
Easy, but not quite as easy as a GIF, which auto-plays when viewed, and that will remain a problem for wider adoption of Live Photos outside of sharing between iPhone-owning friends. Aside from Tumblr, Facebook also supports Live Photo sharing, but the animated part can still only be seen on a device running iOS 9 or above.
In iOS 10, Apple has added an edit feature for Live photos, with both a crop feature and a chance to adjust the length of the animation. There’s also the opportunity to add a filter to Live Photos. Additionally, for the hardcore Live Photo fan and if Apple’s own stabilization system doesn’t quite do the job, then Google Photos has a feature called Motion Stills to steady the shot. It also lets you export Live Photos as short videos.
Finally, in an effort to help spread Live Photos around the web, Tumblr has open-sourced the code that makes it possible to share the photos online, ready for any developer to use. It’s also hard at work creating an Android version too.
