When Phil Schiller introduced the iPhone 6s’ new Live Photos, he noted that Apple had implemented it, “in a space-efficient way, so they don’t take up much more room.”
In fact, according to a new report, Live Photos take up around 2x the space of a regular still photo. That’s still an impressive bit of compression on Apple’s part, but also likely to make life a bit tougher for those planning to buy the entry-level 16GB iPhone 6s.
As TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino explains, Live Photos manage to compress several seconds of movement into each photo because the iPhone doesn’t actually take a series of 12MP images, but rather one 12MP image and a bunch of lower-resolution pictures of the usual “buffer” quality you see when you activate your iPhone Camera app.
Given the better-than-ever iPhone 6s camera, it’s tough to see the difference, but it’s a clever way of not eating up all of your storage for what are, in essence, very short movies.
Live Photo has so far received mixed appraisals from critics, with some praising it as an innovative tool and others dismissing it as a gimmick. We’ll have to wait until the iPhone 6s is safely in our hands to come up with our own verdict, but it definitely seems a pretty neat feature — particularly for amateur photographers looking to document everyday moments.
And, hey, if you’re a 16GB iPhone user, you can always turn it off.
Via: MacRumors
