Apple's bringing moving pictures to Facebook - for a select few

Live Photos

If you decided to buy yourself an iPhone 6S, then you'll be no stranger to Live Photos - and now you can share them with the world.

Sure, you could have sent them on a chum-by-chum basis on iMessage, or posted them to your Tumblr, but now you can finally pop them onto Facebook.

For those that aren't aware, Live Photos capture 1.5 seconds of footage before and after the snap, imbuing the image with motion and sound to provide an 'all round' look at the moment.

And the good news is it's not limited to iPhone 6S users, as anyone with an iPhone or iPad running iOS 9 or later will be able to see the moving images.

Well, not precisely...

You might not find you can access Live Photos on your Facebook feed right away, however, as Apple says the option 'will start with a small percentage of users globally, with broader roll out to continue in the new year.'

Anyone running iOS 9 without a 6S or 6S Plus will be able to access the Live Photo through a long press on the screen, and presumably those with the newer phones will just be able to prod harder to see your wondrous creation.

If you're not on an Apple device, you'll still see the normal snap as you do right now, without any option to get it jiggling under your finger.

But given we're expecting around a quarter of top-end smartphones in 2016 to pack the pressure-sensing tech, we could soon see this available to phones outside the Apple ecosystem - which would be lovely, right?

TOPICS
Gareth Beavis
Formerly Global Editor in Chief

Gareth has been part of the consumer technology world in a career spanning three decades. He started life as a staff writer on the fledgling TechRadar, and has grown with the site (primarily as phones, tablets and wearables editor) until becoming Global Editor in Chief in 2018. Gareth has written over 4,000 articles for TechRadar, has contributed expert insight to a number of other publications, chaired panels on zeitgeist technologies, presented at the Gadget Show Live as well as representing the brand on TV and radio for multiple channels including Sky, BBC, ITV and Al-Jazeera. Passionate about fitness, he can bore anyone rigid about stress management, sleep tracking, heart rate variance as well as bemoaning something about the latest iPhone, Galaxy or OLED TV.