It’s been about 3 months since Apple debuted “live photos” with the iPhone 6s, promptly sparking debates about how “live photos” are similar to or different from GIFs. But while diehard Apple fans were mocked for insisting that Apple created “moving photos”, numerous third party apps have worked to integrate them into their platforms. Most recently Live Photos got support from Tumblr after the social site added support for the image format. And now Facebook is also adding support for Live Photos though there is one catch, only users of the iOS Facebook app can see them.
Yep that’s right, Android, desktop and mobile users will be left behind along with some older generation iPhones; it will only work on devices that have iOS 9. Anything from a iPhone 4s onward will be able to see the Live Photos.
To post a Live Photo, Facebook users can just upload photos as usual, but as you upload you have to check the lower-right corner of the photo, where it says “Live.” Once it’s up on Facebook’s News Feed, it’ll appear as a static image until your friends or followers press on the photo and view the motion, assuming they’re using the iOS Facebook app. However, not everyone has access to this feature yet, only a small pool of users have access to it, with the global roll out finishing sometime next year.
Fingers crossed that Instagram also gets this feature, and let’s toss a lot of coins into a fountain and wish for this feature to roll out to all platforms.
You can download Facebook for iOS here.
