Google’s Motion Stills addresses one of the biggest issues faced by Apple’s Live Photos: stabilization. With the app, instead of jaunty clips you get a smooth video that can be turned into shareable GIFs. Now, Google is pushing out an update to fix another pressing issue: unflattering main frames.
From time to time, when you take a Live Photo on an iPhone, the main frame that’s saved as the default image isn’t the best representation of a picture. Before, there was no way of changing this through Live Photos, but the update to Motion Stills lets you go into the 1.5-second Live Photos clip and chose the frame you want as the cover image.
How does this work?
You can do this in the Motion Stills app through a new slider that lets you shuffle through each individual frame. Once you decide on the frame you like best, you can export the finished product back into your library and it’ll function like any other Live Photo you’ve taken.
The only drawback to this feature may be quality. When you take a Live Photo, the original default image uses the full 12-megapixel camera resolution, but the rest of the frames come out at a lower-resolution to keep the size of the file small. The image you chose may not be as sharp as the original, but it’s a worthwhile compromise.
