How To Restore The Live Component Of Live Photos?

I copied live photos from my iPhone 7 to an external drive and deleted them from my iPhone. They've been gone too long to be retrieved from recently deleted photos, and they're not backed up to my iCloud. On my external drive, they're just HEIC files. I didn't realize that I was losing the live component of these photos when I copied them to my external drive. I had assumed that if I moved them back to an iPhone, they'd be live again, but that's not the case. I'm guessing there's no way to restore the "live" component of these photos now, right? There's no way to repair them to make them "live" again?

I now have an iPhone 13 mini with iOS 17.5.1 and a Macbook Pro with MacOS Sonoma 14.5 in case there's anything that could be done. I would appreciate any advice. Thanks.

Posted on Jun 18, 2024 4:11 PM

Top-ranking reply

léonie

Level 10

200,789 points

Posted on Jun 19, 2024 2:05 AM

The Live component is a separate file - when save Live Photos you have to save two files, the HEIC file with the high resolution still frame and the MOV video clip with the animation.

Deleting a Live Photo from your iPhone will delete all parts of a Live Photo. There is no way to restore it, once it is no longer in Recently Deleted, if you do not have a backup of your iPhone on a computer, from the time, when you still had the Live Photos on your iPhone.

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How To Restore The Live Component Of Live Photos?

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