
Motion Stills – Create Looping GIFs from Live Photos - tambourine_man
https://research.googleblog.com/2016/06/motion-stills-create-beautiful-gifs.html
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fitzwatermellow
Link to underlying CV research breakthrough:

Auto-Directed Video Stabilization with Robust L1 Optimal Camera Paths

[http://www.cc.gatech.edu/cpl/projects/videostabilization/](http://www.cc.gatech.edu/cpl/projects/videostabilization/)

Stunning amount of optimization required to make virtual cinematography
possible in real-time on a mobile device!

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anilgulecha
Wow.. google actually made a iOS only app?

(I know it's because of fragmentation, and they only have to optimize for a
handful or GPUs instead of the very fragmented android landscape. Still..).

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spuz
They have released iOS only apps before (see the Gboard), but specific to this
one, it works with iPhone 6's live photo feature. This is where the phone
records a three second movie clip starting 1.5 seconds before and ending 1.5
seconds after you press the shutter button. It makes sense that this would be
an iOS only app given that most Android's don't have a live photo feature.

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manuelflara
I was _just_ the other day looking for a great app to turn Live Photos into
shareable images easily. I feel a well taken Live Photo provides so much more
life into that moment than a still photo. My current workflow was Gif Toaster
to turn them into GIFs, and then upload the result image to Giphy, and share
that. Painful and slow, really. This new Google app is _AMAZING_ for what I
wanted to do, plus provides stabilization making the resulting images even
better. Goddammit, Google, well done!

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xuki
GIF Toaster is pretty bad, I made an app called Lively
([http://lively.tinywhale.net](http://lively.tinywhale.net)) to convert Live
Photos to GIFs/movies. It doesn't have fancy image stabilization but you can
trim the "live" part or pick a frame out of a Live Photo :). It's free to try.

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Bromskloss
I thought it was going to create an animation from a still photo, and of
course assumed that it would be _smoothly_ looping. It did neither.

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ctdonath
I have an app released which a rare downvoter complained "i thought it would
be a standalone database manager" when the app is nothing of the kind and
didn't claim at all to be.

Likewise: right up front this app clearly addresses Live Photos which is a
particular iOS/iPhone 6s feature. It does not claim to do what you lament it
doesn't.

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raldi
Does anyone know why Google hasn't brought Live Photos to Android yet? And
why, when I upload a Live Photo from my iPhone to Google Photos, and then
visit that photo in a web browser, there's no way to see the animation?

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abritinthebay
If I had to guess..?

Live Photos requires good UI design to make it useful and easy to use and you
can bet that Apple has patented the existing (novel) UI for Live Photos on
iOS.

So Google has to a) come up with a just as good way of doing it b) do it in a
non-infringing way and c) do it in a way that doesn't feel just like a copy-
cat and damage their brand.

Google is _not great_ at UI/UX (they're not bad, just not great, they're solid
but it's not really their focus) so I can imagine this presents a compound and
complex problem for them with all the other factors added.

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avalexandrov
Downloaded it and tried it out. I have to say it works really well. The
stabilization is quite good and you can export the end result as either GIF or
a video with sound (because Live Photos themselves have sound). Good job,
Google.

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ctdonath
Even more so, it automatically stabilizes the clips while you're scrolling
thru your collection - it's practically done with the conversion even before
you see what you might want to convert.

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btbuildem
So, how are Live Photos different from 3-second video clips (other than
resolution)?

There is no technical reason this shouldn't work with short clips or sequences
of still images.

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ctdonath
The critical UX difference is: when in Live Photo mode, it is continuously
recording - idea is you take a photo, and get 1.5 seconds before & after.

This differs from "3 seconds of video" in that it starts recording BEFORE you
decide to.

It's all about the UX.

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rhema
Very similar to the UIST 2012 best paper on "Cliplets" via Microsoft Research
[http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/hoppe/proj/cli...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/hoppe/proj/cliplets/) .

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opticalflow
There's some overlap, but what impresses me is that they're doing camera
tracking (hard) in near-real-time and automatically (even harder) on an
_iPhone_. Camera tracking is used in feature film visual FX frequently, and
it's usually a very manual and specialist intensive process with very esoteric
(and slow) tools...

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rasz_pl
you can do it yourself on a 7 year old laptop in real time
[http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~gk/PTAM/](http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~gk/PTAM/)

Its a bit hilarious that Microsoft hired PTAM author just to put him in ...
MSN software group :D

~~~
opticalflow
What's also impressive to me is that Google's solution seems _robust_ ,
meaning it does a good job in the face of outliers like lens flare, exposure
changes, and the like. I see a lot of research with canned results where they
optimize for the 6 or so clips they test with, but it's an order of magnitude
harder to make it robust enough to release it as GA to the general public.

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tomp
It's 2023, and we still only have 256-color gifs...

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dr_zoidberg
Inside a GIF file, a palette can be redefined anywhere, and in between chunks
of image data. Using that trick, you can pull 24-bit colour GIFs. There are
two problems about it: most GIF editors don't use this trick, and it makes the
GIFs grow significantly (50 MB GIF anyone?).

Raher than pushing an old technology, I'm surprised they didn't go for a
better, modern alternative, like WebM.

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amake
This is surprisingly nice. I like live photos, but they've always been hard to
share. This not only makes it easy, but the image stabilization really
improves the result (maybe I just have a shaky hand).

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fudged71
I wonder if this helps or hurts the folks at Flixel. These look a lot like
cinemagraphs, and they're free/easy to make.

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evan_
This is a neat app but the failure state when it can't figure the motion out
is downright trippy.

I have a live photo of waves coming in on the beach that looks like something
from Inception.

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randomguy7788
haha isn't that a good thing?

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andrewingram
It's great that Google is happy to build iOS apps, I just really wish they'd
stop pushing material design on platforms other than their own.

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tsycho
/rant

I am so tired of comments like yours.

Google does a ton of UX research, so I am sure they have a much better
understanding of whether normal iOS users find their apps usable or not.

If you dislike their design, don't use their apps. It's not pre-installed or
forced upon you in any way.

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andrewingram
I think your comment is more aggressive than is necessary.

My preference is for mobile apps that feel at home on the platform they're
installed on. In my opinion Google builds high quality apps that I want to
(and often do) use, but I have a disagreement with their style choices. This
is a legitimate opinion to hold.

When an app is as good as (say) Google Maps, the fact that I disagree with
some decisions isn't going to stop me using it. But for apps of more
borderline utility, it might do.

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blowski
When you export as a GIF, how do you stop it putting the little watermark in
the bottom right corner?

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stuartleigh
In the settings there is a toggle for watermark

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blowski
Ah I see now, thanks for that. For those as lost as me, to get to the
settings, you have to scroll to the very first photo and then 'pull down'.

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ctdonath
And pull way down. I had to slide-walk several fingers to force it.

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bitL
Excellent! Thank you for this algorithm! Will implement it in my hyperlapse
stabilization suite!

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yxlx
Yes, but can it use a html5 video format instead of gif?

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blowski
It can export as a H.264 video, with or without sound.

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dharma1
would be great to have the stabilisation as a mobile/desktop app for video

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achairapart
Try one of these:

[http://steady.stupeflix.com/](http://steady.stupeflix.com/)

[https://hyperlapse.instagram.com/](https://hyperlapse.instagram.com/)

