Google introduces “Motion Stills” for iOS to create GIF from Live Photos

The research team at Google has released a new app for iOS called Motion Stills that makes use of Apple Live Photos and results in a looping GIF images and movies.

Most people usually do not really care about Apple’s Live Photos. As by design, when you take still photos, iOS automatically records the moment a bit from before and after the photo was taken and turns it into a little animation – like the Windows Living Images on Lumia smartphones.

These little animation, while could be great in a sudden moment, mostly left unused by the users as these are used to be shaky and very poorly stabilized. With the release of Motion Stills, Google is offering you to take care of your Apple Live Photos.

Google’s video stabilization expertise that they have build upon the biggest video sharing platform YouTube, are now being used to make these animations from Live Photos on iOS. The Google’s app analyzes the Live Photos and performs its expert stuff very quickly and gives you looping GIFz or movies which can be shared right away.

We extracted following quick points which the app performs.

• The app discards blurry frames. This also takes care of the crap frames which are recorded while putting the phone back into your pocket.
• The app separates the background from the foreground and then realigns the footage for better stabilization. (Checkout the images below to see the difference)
• The app optimally identifies best start and end points to create the loop.
• The app finally creates a GIF image for you to share online.

You can learn more about the Google’s Motion Stills app at the official blog post in the source below. If you are an iOS user you can download the app right away from itunes.

For now, the feature like Live Photos is not available on Android platform so the Motion Stills app is currently only available for iOS devices.