Turn "Live" Off on an iPhone Camera

[palmerit]

iPhone users know that the iPhone has a feature that records a couple of seconds of video when you take a photo. I know some people have had trouble uploading photos because the HEIC format of these short videos cannot be opened on this site by other users. I'm guessing that's because some people transfer photos from their phone to their computer and then upload the HEIC photos - to get around this they need to convert the HEIC photos in JPG photos. When uploading to this site from my iPhone, the phone automatically converts from HEIC to JPG for the upload thankfully.

 

While I like the feature when looking at snapshots on my phone, I found another problem with the "Live" feature when taking macro shots to upload to this site. Yesterday I snapped a photo of a small part for a post I was making. It certainly seemed to be in focus when the photo was shot. Unfortunately, because it was taken with the "Live" feature, while it seemed in focus, the JPG that was created from the HEIC file was blurry. It was late in the evening and my brain was also blurry so I didn't check the photo and by the time I realized it was blurry I had already installed the part.

 

You can turn off "Live" on the iPhone camera in the camera app (you might be to turn it off permanently in settings too). At least for my version of iOS, in the upper right corner there is bullseye-looking icon. If you click it, it'll turn "Live" on and off. Hope this helps someone else.

[Cathead]

If you're exporting photos directly from the phone, it's easy to turn the live status on/off within the Photos app. There's a menu on the upper left of any live photo that lets you flip between live/loop/bounce/off, etc. Then it will export as a jpeg rather than video. It can be done within the computer version of the Photos app, too, but it's more complicated; you have to hit Edit (like you're going to crop or color balance it) and there's a menu in there to change the live photo setting. Once you set it to off, it exports like a normal photo.

 

Neither of these deals with the problem that you can't choose which frame of the video to export. Ironically, since in actual videos you can. 

 

The real answer is to just pay attention and turn the live feature off when taking model photos, just like you would adjust any other setting (like flash on/off). Personally I can't understand why people leave the live photo feature on all the time. It takes up a huge amount of space storing all your photos as short video clips. I turn it on for very specific needs when having motion actually helps enhance the effect (like a waterfall). But to each their own.