exporting ios live and HDR

I know, maybe the iphone forum was a better bet, but i guessed that there would also be photo-experts on this forum.

We also have a specific "Photos for iOS" forum, where you can ask about working with photos on the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, see: Photos for iOS https://discussions.apple.com/community/app_store/iphoto_for_ios/content?filterI D=contentstatus[published]~objecttype~objecttype[thread]

The forum is in the iOS Apps section of the forum.

Hmm, i was worried about that.

I would expect i could choose any still frame of the live picture in the same quality as the original.

If that is not possible in a way, what is the use of a live photo (apart from the mini video you can show on your iphone ?)

If you want that, you need to take 4k videos for perfect quality, not Live Photos. Or long bursts. Live Photos will give you the nice animation, making the photo come to life. But the iPhone is trying to be frugal with the storage. So only the photo you take, when you release the shutter will have have a high resolution. The video will be highly compressed. You get a very good photo and a some animation When taking Live Photos, you have to hold the iPhone very steady several seconds before and after you take the shot, and be patient enough to wait for just the right moment to get the best possible still frame.

I follow your advice of comparing the HDR and the normal version, but i want to do this on a big screen and not on the phone.

If i understand correctly, the phone app already merges the HDR into 1 picture which then can be exported. You cannot "manipulate" it anymore (like you can for example manipulate a .RAW image) ?

It depends on your settings for Photos & Camera. I have set my iPhone to keep both the HDR and the normal version: http://help.apple.com/iphone/10/#/iph2cafe2ebc

Keep only the HDR version. Go to Settings > Photos & Camera, then turn off Keep Normal Photo. In your albums, HDR versions of photos are marked with “HDR” in the corner.

"Keep Normal version" is on on my iPhone and I keep it this way to avoid the Motion blur. This is expensive, because many photos will be duplicate pairs of HDR and Normal photos, but I can compare them on the larger Display on my iMac and pick the best version. Before I changed the settings I lost some of my best shots by keeping only the HDR version. For example, this poor bear is barely recognizable due to HDR artifacts - see the shifted eyes and the torn fur coat?

Tom, where are your photos now? Still on the iPhone? Or synced to your Mac with iCloud Photo LIbrary?

I am a bit confused, because your question is in the Photos for Mac forum, but you mention you want to "empty my iphone storage"

- can i export a live picture and choose the frame i want after the export? if so, how?

On your Mac you can export a live photo with "File > Export > Export unmodified Original". This will save the original high resolution still frame and a video clip. You can use Photos to extract a different still frame from the video (How to Extract Still Frames from a Live Photo in Photos for Mac), but frames extracted from the video will have a lesser quality.

how is a exported HDR picture different then a normal .jpg ? what can i do with it after export ?

The HDR photos are JPEGs like other JPEGs. The only difference is, that they have been processed by the camera.app. Usually they will show more detail in the highlights and shadows than the regular jpegs, because they are a collage of three jpegs.

I would always export both the normal version and the HDR version, and keep the normal version as well, until I have carefully checked the HDR version, if it is good. The HDR version may be unusable, if the subject in the picture moved, while the three photos have been taken. That may result in bad motion blur in the HDR version, while the regular JPEG may be far better.

The import panel can be really confusing, Tom, if you are using iCloud in any way. The new items may be including photos from "My Photo Stream", and you may be seeing many photos twice. Or worse, photos you imported previously to your Mac and deleted them from your Mac, because they are not good. if you did not yet delete them from the iPhone, they will be shown again as "New", because they are not on the Mac.

I would never summarily import all photos that are listed as new in the Import panel, but only select photos I am sure that have not yet been imported.

I just want to import everything from my phone. I cleaned everything in the photos app (even deleted), but when i hook up the phone, the numbers are still different (1566 actually on phone vs 1577 reported "new" in the photos app) :-(

You could simply use Image Capture to import the photos from your iPhone to a folder on your Desktop. And only then import from this folder to Photos. Image Capture will only show the photos in the Camera Roll (as Photos also should do). There may be more photos in the Camera Roll than counted in Photos. Bursts of photos will be counted as one photo in Photos, but in the Import panel they may be shown as more than one photo. Hidden photos will not be counted in Photos as well, but be showing in the Import panel.

The advantage of importing from a folder will be, that Photos will again check for duplicates when you import from that folder. And you can sort the photos by date in that folder and check the oldest, if they are already in Photos.

The problem is that we are talking about 1500 pictures from my last trip, so selecting manually which ones to import is not an option.

I'm always taking my Laptop with me, so I can import new photos at once, when I return to the hotel, and then delete at once all photos that are not worth keeping 😁 That saves me from having to weed out thousands of photos when I return home. The added advantage is, that I can add captions and titles while I still remember what I have seen.

Ok, i am trying your approach, but image capture does not handle live pictures.

It just imports one .JPG :-(

Image Capture will import Live Photos a s a pair of a video and a JPEG, unless you have iCloud Photo Library enabled on your iPhone, then all bets are off. I always used Image Capture to transfer the videos from my iPhone.

As to your side question: If you want to store your pictures on a NAS, forget about any of Apple's photo applications. None of them can store the Photo Library on a NAS; Apple advises against it. Sooner or later the library will be corrupted and you re risking to lose your photos or the work you invested into them.

Duplicates: I avoid duplicates by importing all photos into one library. Photos will recognize duplicates on Import. But I keep copies of the original image files on backup drives. These duplicates are kept as precaution to be able to recover the originally imported files if the originals in the Photos library should get corrupted by bad disk blocks or similar. JPEG corruption happens silently in the background and we may not beneficing it fr a long time.

There is no export when using Image Capture - it makes a bit for bit copy of the photos to the location you specify

LN