Apple's Live Photos, which turn still photos into GIF-like animations when touched, are now more easily accessible on the Web thanks to Tumblr.
"Live Photos work on the Web now. Whenever you see that famous Live Photo icon, click and hold to make them swing," Tumblr said in a blog post. Look for that icon—which resembles a "concentric-circle supernova," as Tumblr describes it—on the top-left of a photo.
Apple introduced Live Photos in September 2015 as one of the standout features of the iPhone 6s ( at Amazon) and 6s Plus . Whenever you take a picture with the function enabled, your smartphone also captures a three-second video surrounding the time said photo was snapped. Tap and hold the image and watch it come to life.
Until now, Live Photos has largely been a mobile affair, integrating with services like Google Photos for iOS and Facebook for iOS. Google's Motion Stills iOS app also turns Live Photos into looping GIFs that are shareable via SMS and social media. Tumblr, however, was "the first third-party app to support Live Photos" via its iOS app, it pointed out today. "Now we're the first to support them on the Web."
Tumblr is also "open sourcing the javascript library for any webmaster to use: GitHub and npm," and working on supporting Live Photos on Android.
HTC rolled out a similar feature, Zoe, in 2013. But the company wasn't able to convince major players to support the format, so it never took off.
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