In 2015, Apple introduced a new feature to the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus: Live Photos. Basically you could think of this as an enhanced GIF, or a super short video clip which captures seconds before and after a photo was taken, thus giving it more context and making it more interesting, if you’re into that sort of thing.For the most part Live Photos hasn’t had much support save for several third-party apps, and for the web, there’s basically almost no support at all. However it Tumblr will be changing that up and has announced that Live Photos uploaded onto its website will work for the web, meaning that you can view Live Photos from your computer browser.
According to Tumblr, “That’s right! Live Photos work on the web now. Whenever you see that famous Live Photo icon, click and hold to make them swing. Tumblr was the first third-party app to support Live Photos—you could even GIF ’em. Now we’re the first to support them on the web. And! We’re open sourcing the javascript library for any webmaster to use: GitHub and npm. We’re also working on an Android version for you.”
The company did not dive into the details but according to TechCrunch, how they got it to work is by converting the video from .mov to .mp4, and then combining it with the JPEG via its Laphs solution. Does this mean that we can expect more Live Photos on the web? Very possibly, so if you do frequent Tumblr, do keep an eye out for it.
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