Linked List: June 7, 2016

Tuesday, 7 June 2016

Motion Stills – New App From Google Creates Animated GIFs From Live Photos ★

Ken Conley and Matthias Grundmann, from Google Research:

Today we are releasing Motion Stills, an iOS app from Google Research that acts as a virtual camera operator for your Apple Live Photos. We use our video stabilization technology to freeze the background into a still photo or create sweeping cinematic pans. The resulting looping GIFs and movies come alive, and can easily be shared via messaging or on social media.

The before-and-afters are impressive. John Nack has a few more examples on his blog. Google is creating some interesting iOS apps lately, and in this case they’ve solved a problem Apple probably should have solved — making it easy to share Live Photos on social media and the web.

(The comments are a hoot, too — Android users complaining that this is an iOS app, not an Android one, even though Android doesn’t have Live Photos.)