Google unveils own app for turning Live Photos into GIFs

PanARMENIAN.Net - Up until now, Google required converting each of Apple's Live Photos to a GIF using a third-party app, but the company just released its own app that turns Live Photos into GIFs.

It's called Motion Stills, which uses its own video stabilization algorithms to take what might otherwise be a shaky Live Photo and turn it into a smooth GIF that you'll actually want to see repeat.

“We pioneered this technology by stabilizing hundreds of millions of videos and creating GIF animations from photo bursts. Our algorithm uses linear programming to compute a virtual camera path that is optimized to recast videos and bursts as if they were filmed using stabilization equipment, yielding a still background or creating cinematic pans to remove shakiness,” Google explained in a blog post.

“Our challenge was to take technology designed to run distributed in a data center and shrink it down to run even faster on your mobile phone. We achieved a 40x speedup by using techniques such as temporal subsampling, decoupling of motion parameters, and using Google Research’s custom linear solver, GLOP. We obtain further speedup and conserve storage by computing low-resolution warp textures to perform real-time GPU rendering, just like in a videogame.”