A good handful of apps have emerged to expand the capabilities of Live Photos introduced in the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, including a tool to turn Live Photos into GIFs, a Live Photo editor called Alive and another app known as Lively. A fourth option from an indie student developer is Live Studio which – though a slightly less-polished app overall – offers a few unique tricks of its own, including the ability to turn your videos, GIFs and burst photos into Live Photos.
Primarily, the app is intended to help you make Live Photos that you can use as an animated wallpaper on your iPhone’s lockscreen, explains developer Aaron Satterfield. For that reason, it doesn’t yet support exporting the audio component of the video, he says, though he’s working on adding that now. That may make Live Studio less appealing for the time being, if you’re looking for a more fully-featured Live Photo editor.
The app has a simple user interface that introduces a short list of options, like the ability to create Live Photos from other media, or even turn a Live Photo into a video. You can also press – via 3D Touch – on the export options in the provided list for an extended set features. For example, a firm press on “Live Photo to Video” lets you choose to do a batch conversion, while a press on “GIF to Live Photo” lets you instead pick “Burst to Live Photo.”
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On the following screen, Live Studio completes the conversion and then offers you a range of export options, like being able to save the video or Live Photo you created to your Camera Roll, or share your creation within a number of social applications. You can also choose which frame from the video is used as the Live Photo’s main image during this process. And you can kick off your conversions using 3D Touch shortcuts which are accessible by pressing on the app’s icon on your homescreen.
Satterfield, a full-time college student, currently works part-time as an indie developer and part-time with a software startup building apps for Apple TV, like photo slideshow app Slidez. He says that he built the Live Studio app for himself before Lively and Live GIF came out in the App Store because it was something he wanted to use for himself.
“I started working on it as soon at the iOS 9.1 beta came out that allowed me to access Live Photos,” says Satterfield. The 99-cent app, released in November, is still flying under the radar with just around 1,000 downloads, he notes, but is still useful for those looking for Live Photo utilities that fill in the gaps when it comes to working with this new image format.
Live Studio is available here in iTunes.