It has been one year since the launch of my first iOS app ShopAppList. I’m happy to announce that my next iOS app Alive Photos is available for free in the App Store. So, what is Alive Photos about? What makes it different from the similar existing apps?
A small bit about Live Photos
First of all, as you might have guessed from the name (or this post’s title), Alive Photos is about Apple’s Live Photos. Long story short, a Live Photo is a photo with an embedded video. That’s it. No more, no less. The video contains 1.5 seconds just before and 1.5 seconds after the picture. The idea is quite simple, but the result is pretty amazing. It provides a picture with a new dimension, a context that enriches the whole memory. And, contrary to what one might think, a Live Photo only takes up twice as much space as a standard picture. This means that a device is not going to run out of storage because of Live Photos as it might happen after recording several high-quality videos.
Live Photos are natively supported since iOS 9.1. So any iOS device with iOS 9.1 or higher can play a Live Photo. To do that, we long touch the Live Photo to see it moving (in iPhone 6S / 6S Plus we press firmly to play it thanks to the 3D Touch). Live Photos can only be taken with the iPhone 6S/6S Plus, the iPhone SE and the 9.7-inch iPad Pro. What about the rest of the devices? Well, although they cannot capture this photo format natively (i.e. with the system’s camera app), it is possible for third party apps to generate Live Photos in these devices. And that’s the purpose of Alive Photos.
Alive Photos is a Live Photos camera app
Once you know what a Live Photo is, then understanding the purpose of Alive Photos is straightforward. Alive Photos lets you capture Live Photos with any iOS device. Any iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch running iOS 9.1 or higher can take a Live Photo using Alive Photos. After you take a picture, Alive Photos saves it to your device’s Photo Library.
Alive Photos allows you to set a timer and use the device’s flash (when available) as any camera app on the market. It also geotags your Live Photos so that you don’t forget where you took them. In addition, you can see and play all the Live Photos from your device inside the app (as you can do in the Photos app).
Why Alive Photos
You might be wondering why you should download Alive Photos instead of other apps in the App Store which offer the same, supposedly. The first reason is clear. Alive Photos is totally free and ad-free. The second (and, to me, more important) reason is that Alive Photos takes real Live Photos. “What do you mean?” you might ask. Let me explain.
While working on Alive Photos, I sometimes searched the App Store looking for other similar apps. More often than not I got scared finding an app claiming that it allowed us to take Live Photos. I downloaded many of them and yes, you could capture Live Photos, with a caveat. I ended up realizing that, although they did create a Live Photo, there was some kind of trick involved. All of them would record a 3-second video and then it would create the Live Photo from it. As a consequence, the quality of the picture itself is extremely poor, since it is a single frame taken from the video. Moreover, the video is usually high-quality. So you end up having a low-resolution photo that takes up a considerable amount of space in your phone. Don’t try to zoom in that picture. To me, this does not make more sense than simply recording a video.
Getting it right in Alive Photos was a huge challenge. But I truly believe I did it. Alive Photos takes a high resolution photo (according to the megapixels of the device’s camera) and captures a optimized video with the moments before and after the picture is taken. It creates real Live Photos as Apple defined them.
Thanks for reading and share Alive Photos if you like it!
AJPallares 