Meet Alive, a Swiss Army Knife for live photos on the iPhone 6s. There are many live photo editing apps out there, but this one is particularly well designed. Alive lets you turn your live photos into gifs, make animated collages with multiple live photos and clean up your live photo library. But the best part is that it’s my favorite way to view live photos on my phone.
Developed by the team behind Dispatch and Clips, Alive doesn’t try to do everything, but it does a few things right. When you first launch the app, you are presented with a grid view of all your live photos. Instead of showing still images like in the default Photos app, your live photos autoplay.
There are two reasons why I like this view of autoplaying live photos. It’s a great way to see if there are some live photos that don’t make sense or don’t work. It’s also a much better preview — all these photos feel… alive, which is the point of live photos.
Then, you can edit individual live photos. You won’t find as many power user tools as in Lively, another popular live photo app that our own Sarah Perez covered.
In Alive, you can turn a live photo into an animated gif or a video. You can also remove the live part of your live photo and keep the still photo. When you export a live photo to a gif, there aren’t a lot of options. You can tweak the size of the gif by degrading quality and that’s it. Alive also works with videos.
Comparatively, Lively lets you speed up, create a boomerang-like gif and trim your live photo so you can get rid of the boring second at the end. It’s much more powerful than Alive on the editing front.
And yet, I keep coming back to Alive. Browsing live photos in Alive is a real pleasure. You can swipe through your live photos and it loads instantly. You don’t need to use 3D touch to launch your live photos. You can select multiple photos and delete the video element in just a few taps. You can also create collages of your live photos and videos.
Like Lively, Alive uses a freemium model. Downloading and using the app is free. But if you want to remove the watermark from your gifs, batch remove videos and remove ads, you’ll have to pay $2. And ever since I started using Alive, I’ve reconsidered my live photo usage.
