Apple’s Live Photos Problem
An awesome feature that isn’t ready for prime time. We take a look at Apple's Live Photos
I’m a huge photography buff. I’m not anything close to a pro photographer, but I love taking pictures, especially when I travel. For years my only camera has been the one built into my iPhone. That’s why I was so excited that this year’s iPhone 6s was finally getting a much-needed camera upgrade from 8MP to 12MP. But I was even more excited about Apple’s surprise announcement of Live Photos.
Live Photos are unique to the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus. They allow you to capture a moment “frozen in time”, as Apple aptly describes on its website. I liken Live Photos to the moving photographs you see in the Harry Potter films. Of course there’s no magic with Live Photos–they are able to capture both a still and moving image through clever coding. When you tap the shutter on a Live Photo shot it takes a still image and also records a short 1.5 second video on either end.
Some people don’t see the difference between a Live Photo and a short video–but they’re missing the point. A Live Photo is primarily meant to be a still image, yet one that springs to life on your command when you press it and view it on a compatible device. This “life” in a Live Photo adds brief context and sensory experiences that can’t be matched by another medium.
But as much as I love Live Photos, I’ve discovered Apple really hasn’t thought through the viewing of them that well–matter of fact, there are some serious oversights in both iOS and OS X that make the Live Photo experience more frustrating than magical.
Using Photo Stream destroys your Live Photos on your Mac
Apple’s free iCloud Photo Stream was designed to sync your latest 1000 photographs across your devices (iOS devices and Macs). When you take a picture it's uploaded to your iCloud Photo Stream via wifi and then downloaded on all your devices. However, the problem with Photo Stream is that it only syncs still photos and not any video files.
This was never an issue previously because Photo Stream would still sync your still images and then you’d manually need to import any videos you shot on your iOS devices to your Mac. But because Live Photos are both a photo and video, Photo Stream literally ruins them.
Photo Stream will only sync the still image part of a Live Photo–the video parts gets left behind. As hundreds of angry iPhone 6s owners have reported on Apple’s forums, once Photo Stream syncs the still image part of a Live Photo to the Photos app on OS X, even if you plug in your iPhone 6s to your Mac, the Photos app won’t import the full Live Photo because it already thinks it has by importing just the still image portion. This leads to many Mac owners thinking the only place they can view Live Photos is on their iPhone 6s.
It gets worse: if Photo Stream has already imported the still image portion of a Live Photo onto your Mac the only way to get the full Live Photo on your Mac is to completely delete all the still image portions of the Live Photos (not easy to do, see below), turn off Photo Stream on all your devices so it doesn’t try to resync just the still image portion of Live Photos, and then manually connect your iPhone and import your Live Photos via a hard USB connection. Needless to say, this means you must permanently disable Photo Stream on all your devices less you want to have to delete every Photo Stream synced photo every time, disable Photo Stream every time, and then reimport all your photos over USB.
If there is a silver lining, it’s that for those people who use Apple’s paid iCloud Photo Library feature, that will sync Live Photos across your iPhone and Mac. However, as most people have photo libraries over iCloud’s paltry free 5GB storage limit and the next level up is 50 GB at $0.99 a month–even then most people have photo libraries over 50GB. The next level up that would likely hold most people’s photo libraries is 200GB at $2.99 a month–a big ask for lots of casual photographers.
There’s no dedicated Live Photos album
Above I explained how you need to delete the still image portion of a Live Photo on your Mac so your iPhone will know the Live Photo needs to be reimported to Photos for OS X. The problem is this is hard to do because, bafflingly, Apple has not created a dedicated Live Photos album in the Photos app on OS X or on iOS. Every other type of special photo–Selfies, Screenshots, Panoramas, Bursts, etc–have their own dedicated albums those types of photos are automatically sorted into. But not Live Photos. Why?
This means you need to manually look through every photo in your library to find your Live Photos. It’s just easier to delete the entire batch of your last Photo Stream synced photos then find each individual Live Photo in the bunch.
There’s no metadata icon for Live Photo thumbnails
The above could be forgiven if there was at least a way to tell a photo is a Live Photo just by looking at it. This is something the Photos apps in OS X and iOS both allow for with other types of photo metadata by showing metadata icons on photo thumbnails. In the screenshot here you can see the photo thumbnail can display icons that show its metadata is marked as a favorite, that it has a keyword, and that it has a location (and more).
The lack of a Live Photo thumbnail metadata icon is even more frustrating when you realize that if you bring up the Info window for a Live Photos in the Photos for OS X app, you can even see Apple has a Live Photos metadata icon ready–so it's baffling that you can’t enable this icon to show on the thumbnail of photos like you can with other metadata.
Lastly to this point: Apple also shows a Live Photos icon in the corner of the Live Photo when you view it full screen–so why not on the thumbnail where seeing it would arguable be more useful?
You can’t create a smart album full of Live Photos
Yet again, the above could be forgiven if you could at least create one of Photos for OS X’s powerful Smart Albums, which lets you group photos automatically by parameters, such a date or location taken, title, keywords, and more. Yet again, Apple has left out the ability to use the Live Photo file type as a variable when creating Smart Albums.
Sometimes audio is a bad thing
This final observance isn’t a bug or an oversight on Apple’s part–it’s just a request from me. I like that Live Photos record audio. If you’ve taken a Live Photo of a tree with its leaves rustling in the wind you’ll recognize how powerful this is. But many times audio distracts from the Live Photo (people talking in the background when you are taking a picture of your daughter at her birthday party, for example). It would be great if Apple gave people the option to toggle Live Photos audio on or off.
Conclusion
Look, Live Photos ROCK. I really do LOVE them. It’s just sad that a user’s ability to view and organize them is majorly hindered by a poor user experience if you use Apple’s Photo Stream feature. It’s also frustrating that neither the Photos app on iOS nor OS X offer any organizational tools for Live Photos that would make finding them easy.
I hope this is something Apple corrects soon (indeed, I hoped it would be corrected in iOS 9.1 and OS X 10.11.1, but nope), because Live Photos is going to change the way we capture memories–if only Apple thinks through a Live Photo’s syncing and organizational ease as well as they thought through the concept of the Live Photo itself.



