One of the features Apple has been promoting with the new iPhone 6s is Live Photos. I look at Live Photos as something between a GIF and a video. On the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, when you take a photograph, the phone captures data for a second and a half before and after, and then stores this in the form of a Live Photo. Alive is a wonderful app by one of my favorite developers, Clean Shaven Apps, that helps you edit and convert these Live Photos into GIFs or videos.
Interface
Alive works on all devices running iOS 9, so even if you can’t capture Live Photos, you can work with Live Photos sent to you, or just work with videos stored on your device. The interface in Alive is dark and looks very pleasing. I used Alive on my iPad Air 2 and it supports all the multitasking modes and works great throughout. You can toggle between Live Photos, Videos, or all through the segmented control in the bar at the bottom. My only complaint with the interface is this segmented control. It looks cramped and non symmetric. Your videos and Live Photos play in the small thumbnail view.
Editing
Alive makes it really easy to export your Live Photos and videos into either GIFs or videos, or even collages of GIFs. Tap to select an image or multiple ones and hit the share button on the bottom left of the screen. This brings up a custom share action with multiple options. The GIF sharing lets you tweak the size with a handy slider and crop out the correct portion of the Live Photo or video. While this custom action sheet is displayed, the same share button will now actually let you share your edited media using the native share sheet. I would’ve preferred a different glyph used on the main view of the app to avoid confusion. Live Photo editing also allows for an option to discard the video content in a photo and replacing it with a normal photo.
Pricing and Final Thoughts
Alive is a free app with an optional In-App Purchase to unlock Pro features like batch removing videos for Live Photos and removing advertisements. The free app adds Alive branding to all images you share and this is removed when you buy the Pro upgrade. The Pro upgrade is priced at just $1.99 and is well worth the purchase. You can download Alive on the App Store for Free.