Live Photo conversion

Which version of Photos do you have installed? And how did you transfer the Live Photos to your Mac? When Live Photos are imported incorrectly, they will be separated as a video clip and the still frame as a separate image. This can happen, if you import photos by My Photo Stream and by connecting the iPhone to USB as well. You may already have the still images, if you look in the Photos view.

To extract a still frame from the video clips,

• open the video enlarged, and advance to the frame that you want to extract as a still frame.
• Then click the actions button (the gears icon) at the right end of the video controls.
• Now select "Export Frame to Pictures". This will save a single image file in the Pictures folder.

Leonie, what you describe is not what is happening on my MacBookPro. Rather, my 'Live Photos' show up in the 'videos' folder under the heading "media types". They show as 2- or 3-second videos and the ability to 'turn off live Effect' isn't available - it is greyed out.

Must I somehow convert each video separately? How do I achieve that - if that is even possible?

I appreciate any suggestions you can offer.

Your Live Photos are a pair of a still frame and a video clip.

If you want to convert them to the still frames, select all Live Photos, then use the command "File > Export > Export unmodified original". This will export both parts of the Live Photo.

Now delete the selected Live Photos in Photos and empty the Recently Deleted album.

Then reimport photos to Photos, but only the still frames, not the videos. But keep a backup of the exported originals, so you can restore them later.

If you just turn off the Live Effect in Photos to convert the Live Photo into a still image, this will save nothing. Photos will just disable the Live effect but keep the video component, so you can revert to the Live Photo. so, no storage will be saved.

Many, many thanks, Leonie, for your helpful reply!

I had just worked out the way to convert from video to still by using the technique you outlined in your answer. One problem I have is that, if the video shows people's faces, then either the 'unnamed' box shows, or else their names show (if known). If I select a frame from the video those name boxes show in the final still photo, too. Or is there a way to suppress the name boxes?

All my software is up to date, including Photos v 4. Yes, I did import via a USB cable connection - maybe that was the problem. I do have "My photo stream" turned on but I'm not sure if I need it because I have 'photos' turned on in iCloud settings, so my photos upload via the cloud automatically (if I understand correctly).

And thank you most of all for mentioning that the videos do show as still photos, too, in the main Photos library. I have been playing around with that for a few minutes and I can see that if I delete one of the short 2-sec videos from my main Photos library, it also disappears from the 'videos' library. Whew. That will be a time-saver, for sure!

Again, my deepest appreciation for your clear comments. You've given me answers when the Apple Support team has been unable to help. Yikes!

How big are your "Live" photos compared to normal ones. I'm finding that my live photos are only 0.1 MB larger than my non-live Photos. For me that wouldn't save enough to justify the effort.

You should be able to disable the display of the circled around the faces in the View menu:

View > Hide Faces names