Twitter should be working on going out of business.
It’s a cesspool and this won’t help.
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Twitter Finally Launches Support for Live Photos, Allowing Them to Be Uploaded as GIFs
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It’s a cesspool and this won’t help.
i think that even if they were to alter the file format to something like .apng under the hood they’d still surface the feature as“.gif” support—the name and its brand is just too strong
Generally I agree with you, but there have been some very fun moments captured in a photo that a few seconds of motion would greatly embellish. Think kids, pets, people smiling.
I'd completely forgotten about all the drama surrounding that. My Slashdot days are ancient history.
This is Proof that Twitter, like Apple, has few good software developers anymore !
I discovered something wrt Apple ONLY two days ago, that caught my attention ... specifically, that Apple, a company with a market cap of ~$1.2T USD, has NO iOS support for HDR10+, NOT even "per-scene" support !
And yesterday, Twitter, a company with a market cap of ~$23B USD, announces support for Live Photos !
When I heard that, it got me LOL, BIG time !
I discovered something wrt Apple ONLY two days ago, that caught my attention ... specifically, that Apple, a company with a market cap of ~$1.2T USD, has NO iOS support for HDR10+, NOT even "per-scene" support !
And yesterday, Twitter, a company with a market cap of ~$23B USD, announces support for Live Photos !
When I heard that, it got me LOL, BIG time !
When I first read about Live Photos I thought they sounded stupid. And, again, when I first tried Live Photos on my iPhone X I thought they were lame. BUT when I downloaded the Motion Stills app made by Google, I found Live Photos to be one of the most fun things to use! I create fun, cool animations in seconds every day! I had to reduce the image quality of the one below a little to make the file small enough to upload to Mac Rumors. This is Yoda, one of 19 rescue dogs I care for!
I wish Apple would take functionality similar to Motion Stills by Google and incorporate it into the iPhone!
I wish Apple would take functionality similar to Motion Stills by Google and incorporate it into the iPhone!
It's probably not an actual GIF format file. The meaning of "gif" has changed to mean a short video clip with no sound, which is likely what Twitter is uploading and storing in a video format like MP4.
Your comment is about as relevant as people slamming new emojis, saying Apple should be putting those resources into bug fixing.
Have you read about their very recent direction involving support and research into decentralisation? That's more likely to have an impact of some sort.
And they still didn’t get it right. Don’t people realize that live photos contain full HD video with sound? If they really want to support live photos, they need to support uploading them as is, with sound and everything. Converting to GIF keeps the animation but removes the sound and reduces image quality. Far from being good enough to call it live photos support.
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If whatever twitter is uploading and storing includes sound, then yeah it’s most likely mp4. Not suprising at all if that’s the case, since mp4 is actually the format Apple uses to save the video portion of the live photos.
I hate those kind of apps. They turn a full hd video with sound into a lame animation with no sound and lower image quality. Live Photos are nice, but Apple was extremely stupid in not providing file system access to the actual live photo files so they could eventually be shared to other platforms as is instead of having to convert to GIF. Nonetheless, Apple does already offer the possibility to convert live photos to GIF in the default photos app, it’s just kinda hidden.
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That can hardly if at all be called support for live photos, since all they do is convert the live portion into a GIF and that’s been possible from within the default photos app in iOS for a while now. A live photo is a *.pvt compressed file that contains a jpg still image and a 3 second long *.mp4 full HD video with sound. If anyone wants to support live photos, they need to support sharing the live portion as is. Converting live photos to GIF doesn’t count as actually supporting live photos, because it removes the sound and reduces the image quality a lot, so no. Nobody actually supports live photos. They can’t because Apple has completely blocked file-system level access to the live photo files.
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They can‘t do it because it requires direct access to the actual live photo files and Apple went to great lengths to make that extremely difficult if not impossible. That’s why I’m not a fan of live photos. If I can’t share them with users on other platforms, they’re useless and I’d rather either take a still photo or a video.
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That can hardly be called support. All they do is convert the live portion to a gif and that could already be done from the default iOS/iPadOS photos app. Besides, the live portion of a live photo is a 3 second long full HD video with sound, and converting that to a GIF reduces the image quality and removes the sound. It’s not worth it. Live photos are useless until they can be shared onto other platforms without losing any of their properties.
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Especially because Apple made it impossible to share live photos to other platforms, making them mostly useless. Yes, we could convert them to GIF, but that just doesn’t cut it because it reduces the image quality and removes the sound of the animated portion of the live photo.
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3rd parties ought to be working in ways to access the actual .pvt compressed files of the live photos and be able to extract the still jpg image file and the 3 second *.mp4 video file that plays when the live photo is activated so they can at least be shared separately. Until they do so, they’d better not say they support live photos because it’s just not true.
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