One of the new features of the iPhone 6s & iPhone 6s Plus that was demonstrated on Wednesday was the Live Photos feature, which captures an additional 3 seconds of photos surrounding your snapshot. This allows the phone to create an animated photo, complete with sound.
Not much more information was revealed on Wednesday, but now TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino has revealed in a new video that the new photo format takes up approximately twice the space of a normal 12-megapixel photo.
Panzarino describes that even the current iPhones start taking photos the moment the Camera app is launched, and that traditionally, only the last photo the moment the shutter is pressed is stored. The new system will simply take the surrounding photos and compress them into this new format.
Live Photos can be viewed on on existing iPhones, iPads, Macs and Apple Watch devices with the latest operating systems, and Apple is making the API available to developers for use in their own apps. Facebook has already announce that they’ll be supporting Live Photos in their iOS app later this year.
In related news, @DanMatte notes that the new format is actually a bundle of images based on the JPEG file format, and can easily be sent as a normal still image to devices that don’t support Live Photo. More information is available in Apple’s developer documents.
