Several years ago, Apple introduced a new feature to iOS called Live Photo. This is basically where if you were to enable this feature on the iOS camera, it takes a photo that when you long press on it, becomes a very short video clip. The concept behind it is that it captures video before and after you press the shutter, so that when you view it, you have a bit more context to the photo.
It is admittedly a rather novel feature and one of the drawbacks to using it is that it will end up taking up more space on your device than you would like. So what can you do about that? If you’ve already taken the photo and can’t retake it again, you can actually extract a still image from Live Photo that you can then save to your camera roll and then delete the Live Photo version, and this is how you do it.
How To Extract A Still Image From A Live Photo
- Open the Live Photo you want in your camera roll
- Tap the Share button at the bottom left corner of the screen
- Scroll down and tap on Duplicate
- Tap Duplicate as Still Photo
What this does is that it will make a copy of the Live Photo but as a still image, meaning that you lose all interactiveness with it. This is useful if you’ve taken a bunch of Live Photos by accident and want to delete them to conserve space. Alternatively, creating a duplicate means that you can edit the duplicate while leaving the original intact, in case you want a reference photo for later.
You can also make sure that future photos you take are not a Live Photo. To do this:
- Launch the Camera app
- Tap the circular icon located at the top right corner of the screen
- If it was orange, it means Live Photo is enabled, if it’s white, it means Live Photos are turned off