Live Photos, a cool feature that is not essential to the iOS photography experience, preserves the moment before and after you take the photo. They’re great for bringing a particular photo “to life,” and they’re especially excellent for making your own GIFs from photos—but they also take up a lot of storage space. These files can be twice as large as regular photos. This can cause problems for photo storage as Apple defaults to Live Photos.
Fortunately, it’s relatively easy to turn the feature off, and you can easily (and temporarily) switch it back on if you want to take a specific shot as a Live Photo. First, I’ll show you how to keep your Camera app from automatically taking Live Photos, then I’ll show you how make Live Photos act like regular photos when you share them with other iOS users.
How to disable live photos
- Launch the Camera App
- To disable it, tap the Live Photo icon within the photo interface. It’s located in the upper left in iOS 16.
That’s all! You should now close your Camera app and the Live Photo icon will be off. The icon can be reactivated by pressing it. It will remain active until you turn it off.
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How to disable Live Photo features in a photo you’ve already taken
This allows you to share older Live Photos that you took before you were informed by the above information. It is possible to disable all Live Photo bells before you send it. Once you’ve done that, it’ll look like a regular photo when you send it. Here’s how to do it.
- In the Photos, open the photo you wish to edit.
- Press LiveIn the upper left corner.
- You will see a pop-up menu. Tap on the Boom of the List to Turn Off Live Photo
Unfortunately, this doesn’t delete the Live Photo information, so these photos will continue to take up a ton of room on your phone. On the other hand, it means it’s relatively easy to reactivate animations on a Live Photo at a later date: Just go through the same steps above and press Live again.
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You can also choose from other Live Photo options in the menu. These options control how your Live Photo plays back. You can switch between them. The default setting is Live which plays the entire photo from beginning to end. The following descriptions are of the options available:
- LoopPlayback can be re-enabled at any time.
- BounceWhen playback hits an end, it will play backwards to the start, then forwards, over and again.
- Long-term Exposure: A blurred effect.
