Google Motion Stills Comes to Android

Released over a year ago on iPhone, Google’s experimental Motion Stills app has finally come to Android.

I wrote about the iOS version of the app when it was released in June 2016, noting that it turns an iPhone’s live photos into stabilized animated GIFs and short movies that can easily be shared. Put simply, it takes something proprietary and limited—Apple’s live photos technology—and sets it free.

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Now, Motion Stills is available on Android 5.1 and newer. It works much like the iOS version, but includes some new functionality too.

For example, since Android phones don’t usually include a live photos-like feature, Google built a new recording experience into the app that emulates that functionality. There’s a new Fast Forward feature that helps you speed up and condense longer clips into short clips that are easy to share. It also has an improved trimming algorithm, and a new video processing pipeline as well.

“By computing intermediate motion metadata, we are able to immediately stabilize the recording while still performing loop optimization over the full sequence,” a post to the Google Research Blog explains. “All this leads to instant results after recording — no waiting required to share your new GIF.”

You can find Motion Stills for Android in the Google Play Store.

 

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Conversation 3 comments

  • plettza

    21 July, 2017 - 12:07 am

    <p> You mean like Living Images we've had for years?</p>

    • JudaZuk

      24 July, 2017 - 2:22 am

      <blockquote><a href="#151194"><em>In reply to plettza:</em></a><em> – Exactly. Living images got introduced in 2014, and long time after that, Apple "Invents" the same damn thing and now 3 years later Google is finally catching up .. wow . And Living images is not even mentioned in this article </em></blockquote><p><br></p><p>Update:</p><p>Actually Nokia introduced this feature even earlier with Nokia Cinemagraph , in 2013 🙂 </p>

  • Nicholas Kathrein

    21 July, 2017 - 12:58 pm

    <p>A feature that many will like. I'm sure Google will show it off when they debut the new Google Pixel phones in Sept or Oct. Thanks for the post. </p>

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