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Comment by metaphor | Hacker News Reader

What differentiates a Live Photo from a GIF?

What exactly is an Apple site?

Live Photos combine two things: the 3s video capture (1.5s before and 1.5s after you take the picture) at relatively low resolution, and the actual photo that is taken at full camera resolution. GIFs are missing the latter, and are more flexible in terms of length and what have you. This particular presentation also sticks to Apple's standard presentation of Live Photos: as a static high-res photo with an encircled play button (in some cases including the world LIVE) that triggers the associated low-res video.

EDIT: No idea what you're asking about re: an Apple site. This is Apple releasing JS to make it easy to display a Live Photo on any site.

Thanks for clarifying.

The Apple site question was me thinking that the API was part of some sort of web front-end that only Apple users were privy to, if you will.

You should probably be asking what differentiates it from a video file. GIF is horrible - it's limited to 256 colors, and it sucks at compression compared to MP4, let alone HEVC.

Nobody coming up with these GIF killers gets what made GIF popular - it's simple as hell. A gif will play on anything, and you can easily save it the same way you'd save a photo. Life's good.

Now try to save a gif on Twitter without resorting to scripts or developer tools. Try to right click and save an Imgur gifv, then upload that back to imgur again.

GIFs are simple. You save an image file. You're done. Video is complex. You can't just have an mp4 (well, x264) file because that's patent-troubled. You can't just have a webm file because that's not supported by Apple devices.

Even these live photos are difficult. You need to add Apple JavaScript to your page, and the live photos themselves are made up of two files:

>Your Live Photo will be stored as a pair of files: a JPG file and a MOV file.

Yeah, GIF itself is a bad format, but simplicity is why it's still around.

It's not simplicity. It's browser support. PNG wasn't around until it was supported by most browsers, even if it's simple format. You can't find BMP now in web, it was replaced by PNG (or JPEG). GIFs will be replaced by proper video files, when support will be good. They are not more complex than GIFs from the user perspective.

I agree with your points about gifs.

However I don't think apple ever intended Live Photos to be a replacement for gifs. They're just a fun little feature that works well within the context of taking photos with a cell camera.

>> However I don't think apple ever intended Live Photos to be a replacement for gifs. They're just a fun little feature...

Respectfully, I don't think Apple makes fun little business decisions either.

'The sum is greater than its parts'.

There are lots of fun little features in iOS.

> You can't just have an mp4 (well, x264) file because that's patent-troubled.

This was true of gif until the mid 2000s, well after it became popular.

Only because gifs got a headstart in a time content creators mostly weren't aware of the patent situation. There was a huge push for a replacement once the situation became widely known. Gifs only had a massive renaissance _after_ the patent expired.

While GIF was gaining popularity as a video format (YTMND and all) in 2004 when the patents expired, I think it was later that it really exploded, with sites like Reddit appearing, and social media gaining steam in general.

> Yeah, GIF itself is a bad format, but simplicity is why it's still around.

Is it still around? Vast majority of "GIFs" from gfycat and imgur are now served as MP4. I rarely encounter GIFs anymore.

GIFs seem to be alive and well on Tumblr, to say the least.

Tumblr-compressed GIFs look pretty unwell to me.

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