Live Photos, the iPhone 6S exclusive feature, seems to be all the rage right now. In all honesty they’re pretty close to animated GIFs and super short looped videos, despite the fact that the technology behind them is a bit different.
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As cool as they look, one Live Photo takes twice the space of a still image and while having a few great ones seems reasonable, plaguing your Gallery with these picture-video hybrids is not storage-friendly at all. Especially if you own an iPhone 6S with just 16 GB of built-in storage, but not only. In the long run, it’s always good to keep your media collection clean and relevant.
Deleting some of your Live Photos would be the obvious choice, but what if you’d like to keep a number of them as still images – you’ll still retain your precious memories but at 1/2 the price regarding occupied storage space, which seems like a reasonable compromise.
Technically you can open a Live Photo in the Photos app, tap on Edit and then tap on the bullseye icon, then tap once more on Done and voila! A still photo.
Technically, this is a still image, but the part which actually made it a Live Photo doesn’t get deleted. If you were to open your ex-Live Photo in edit mode once more, you’d get a Revert option so you can add back the ‘live’ part anytime you want. And obviously, this means storage-wise you don’t get to free up anything.
A new app called Lean is making its mark in the App Store as it offers a simple solution for converting Live Photos to still images for real, and with no Revert option.
Download Lean (iTunes)
It’s 100% free and very easy to use. Lean displays all your Live Photos and lets you select multiple items. After you’re happy with your selection just tap on the ‘Clean up X Live Photos’ option.
Then all you need to do is to confirm your choice (or cancel it if you changed your mind) and the app will inform you of the number of converted Live Photos and total amount of freed storage space.
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And worry not – your newly converted photos will retain the quality of the original photo as Live retains all the metadata from the original.
Give Live a try and let us know of your experience with the app in the comments section below or by sending us a message on Facebook,Twitter or Google+.
