Google Photos on iOS can now enhance your Live Photos

The Google Photos iOS app can now do more with your Live Photos, thanks to the addition of rendering and advanced stabilization technology it previously rolled out in a photo editing app called “Motion Stills” this June. The Motion Stills app improves your Live Photos by helping you to do things like crop out the blurry frames (like when you’re lifting the phone), freeze the background, create cinematic pans, stabilize the images, and more.

It can also turn Apple’s proprietary Live Photos format into more easily shareable looping movies.

Google borrowed much of what it learned from its earlier work on video stabilization at YouTube and on other projects in order to develop Motion Stills. And for iOS users who take a lot of these animated photos, the app has been a great resource.

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However, standalone applications that perform a niche function have trouble gaining traction in today’s App Store. Motion Stills, for instance, is only ranked at #717 in the “Photo & Video” category on the iTunes App Store. Meanwhile, Google’s flagship Photos application, Google Photos, is #7 on that list, and the #67 free app overall. It only makes sense that Google would bring Motion Stills’ same feature set over to the Photos app’s larger user base.

In addition to the new Live Photos functionality, version 2.0 of the Google Photos app also introduced an easier way to share videos to YouTube, the ability to sort photos in albums chronologically or by recently added, and the ability to choose a new thumbnail for faces in the People section – the latter a popular request from the app’s users, says Google.

Google also notes that the new sorting feature will arrive on Android in the near future and has already rolled out on the web.