An Engineer

Apple announced Live Photos (aka Harry Potter photos) as part of their Hey Siri media event on 9/9. By itself, the idea of pre-capturing some shots before and after the shutter is pressed is not a significant innovation. Panasonic offered this previously and others probably have too.

What makes the Apple announcement interesting is that they have this feature turned on by default and they are going to not only support it across their multi-device iCloud Photos service but also actively try to get other services to support the format.

They claimed that facebook has already agreed to support Live Photos and that they are going to make the APIs to manipulate Live Photos available to all. This is crucial because unless the entire world starts supporting the format, then your photos are going to be stripped down to ordinary JPEGs when you share them outside Apple (and let’s face it, social is not Apple’s forte).

There has been very little innovation in what a photo is in the last twenty years. We added some geo meta data, which is certainly useful, but other than that, not much has changed. This has the potential to dramatically change what we consider a photo.

If they are successful with this, they might also push folks to take more natural photos and fewer posed shots. I can’t imagine a posed shot being very interesting in Live Photo mode. Either you see that the subject was not smiling right before, or you see that they were smiling rigidly the whole time. Either way, that’s boring. So perhaps folks will tend to take a more photo journalism approach to capturing life, taking more candids.

Kudos to Apple for noticing that people really like animated GIFs, even though they are a bit goofy. I truly hope that Apple is successful with Live Photos. It could change the way we view photography for a long time.