How to import / copy Live Photos from my iPhone 11 Pro Max to my Macbook

My PhotoStream does not support any Live Photos or videos at all.

Any Live Photo will be transferred as a still frame only. You can import Live Photos by connecting the iPhone to a USB port and downloading them directly, but first you will have to delete the still frames transferred by My Photo Stream.

A Live Photo is a pair of a high resolution still frame and video component. Both have to be imported together at the same time. If you have already a still frame in your library, the duplicate detection will only let you import the video component, and you will have a video, not a Live Photo. So, delete all traces of the failed imports, and empty Recently Deleted, before you try to import the Live Photos by connecting the iPhone to a USB port.

Connect the iPhone to your MB with it's USB cable, open PHotos and import all or just selected photos into the library. Then in the sidebar under Albums click on the Live Photos icon.

That will give you all of the Live Photos in the library.

Hello, tintincute. Thank you for posting to the Apple Support Communities. We understand your question and how you would like to view and edit your Live Photos on your MacBook. We know that you must be eager to access your Live Photos on all of your devices, and we can certainly help you with this. 

As it turns out, the best option for viewing Live Photos would be to use the Photos application on your Mac. You can find more details about using the Photos app in the following Apple Support article: 

View individual photos in Photos on Mac - Apple Support

To keep your photo library automatically updated across all of your devices, you may be interested in using the iCloud Photos feature. You can see how to enable this feature on your devices in this last article: 

Set up and use iCloud Photos - Apple Support

We hope that this information helps you access your Live Photos on all of your devices. Please let us know if you have any additional questions about these features. 

Cheers!

Apple's "Live" photos are only live when inside a Photos Library or on the mobile device that took it. Outside of those two environments they end up as you found, just a jpeg and mov file with the same file name.

They need to code/software in those two environments to become "live".

Hello, tintincute. Thank you for replying back about viewing Live Photos on your devices. We understand that you are still unable to view your Live Photos on your Mac. 

Using the Photos app would be the best way to view Live Photos on your Mac. To confirm, have you been able to follow the instructions listed in the article that we previously provided? You can also find these instructions below: 

“In the Photos app on your Mac, do one of the following: 

- Position the pointer over a Live Photo thumbnail. 

- Double-click a Live Photo thumbnail to view it individually, then position the pointer over the Live Photo badge. 

- If you double-click a Live Photo that is set to Loop, Bounce, or Long Exposure, the Live Photo plays immediately.”

If you are not seeing these options right away on your Mac, it may be necessary to update your current version of macOS. Before installing any software updates, we would recommend that you create a current backup of your data. You can find instructions for this in the following Apple Support articles: 

How to back up your Mac - Official Apple Support

Update macOS on Mac - Apple Support

We hope that this information helps. Please reply back here if you have any other concerns. 

Have a great day!