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
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
4 responses to “Live Photos are great — just not for 16GB iPhones”
before the most recent update, we could delete photos from our phone, but they would stay in the cloud and other synced devices. Now, if you delete on phone, they delete everywhere. Bring back that option, and you could have your cake and eat.
It *is* a gimmicky deal, designed for those who want to show their friends the feature in a “hey check this out” kind of situation. After you’re done showing it off, my prediction is that most will end up turning it off.
Still, Apple gets a +1 for thinking of it. No matter which way you slice it, it’s innovative.
You could also use iCloud Photo Library and then not worry about filling your phone up with photos… Maybe that’s why they just halved the cost of iCloud storage.
Can’t believe Apple kept the 16gb base size, absurd in a time when 32gb & 16gb flash cost pennies difference in price.