Q: Live Photos Have Become Videos
Hi,
I have an iPhone 6s (which can take live photos) and an iPad 2 (both running iOS 9.2.1), along with an iMac running OS X 10.11.3 and Photos 1.3.
I've noticed that some of my live photos (all older ones) have become videos. For each, I get a completely still image and then a three second long video, rather than a single live photo.
As I have iCloud Photo Library enabled, this is replicated across all my devices.
I have not touched the files.
Other live photos (newer ones) appear as live photos, in line with expectations.
Is there any way to fix this? In other words, can I change the image + video combo back to a live photo?
Thanks.
Posted on Mar 1, 2016 2:00 PM
I have found a solution to this.
I found this thread. It is about a slightly different problem, but the (eventual) solution works. The basic idea is to reimport the files into Photos, which makes it recognise that the still images and three-second videos are part of the same live photo.
- Open Photos on macOS
- Cmd-click to select all of the affected files (both the still image and the three-second video for each photo)
- Choose File > Export > Export x Items
- In the dialogue box that pops up, ensure you are preserving the location
- Save the files somewhere temporarily (the desktop is ideal)
- Reimport the files by dragging all of them back in to Photos (they will appear under today's date)
- You will notice that the still photos and three-second videos have combined to become live photos once again
- Highlight each new live photo in turn and select Image > Adjust Date and Time and change the date and time to what it should be (you can look at the date/time on the still photo to see what it should be)*
- Delete the unwanted still and three-second video versions of the photos
- You should be left with just the live photos, correctly dated; these will sync with your other devices if you have iCloud Photo Library enabled
* I realise manually dating all the affected photos is a pain. You may be able to avoid it by choosing Export Unmodified Originals (which preserves the date), but I couldn't get this to work: I was left with three copies of each file (one correctly-dated still image, one correctly-dated video and, tellingly, one video dated the day everything went wrong) – no matter what I did, these files did not recombine into live photos when reimported into Photos.
Posted on Aug 9, 2016 6:21 AM