Apple's new Live Photos feature will not take up all of your phone's memory, but it will take double the storage of a normal 12-megapixel photo.
Live Photos basically allows users to capture a motion picture rather than a simple still image, as it adds an additional three seconds of video to the photo to show the before and after moments as well. Tapping on the photo will then show it in motion.
"A still photo captures an instant frozen in time. With Live Photos, you can turn those instants into unforgettable living memories," Apple touts. "At the heart of a Live Photo is a beautiful 12-megapixel photo. But together with that photo are the moments just before and after it was taken, captured with movement and sound."
The new Live Photos feature is on by default and allows uses to take photos just as they normally do, without doing anything extra. The iPhone does all the heavy lifting, so here's how it works.
When you lift your iPhone to take a picture, it already starts taking photos even before you tap the photo button. When you do press the button, it just shows you the last photo taken, not the whole bunch of photos it took before you pressed the photo button. Don't think that you'll end up with a bunch of images of the same thing in your gallery when you only took one.
As TechCrunch's Matthew Panzarino explains in a new video, the iPhone basically buffers a set of image in its image buffer so that when you actually press the button to take a photo, it fires it instantly. That's how iPhones have handled photos for a good while now.
With the new Live Photos in the iPhone 6s, Apple is now adding that image buffer to your photo and takes the sidecard data to recompile it into a motion picture, showing the moments before and after the actual photo you took.
It remains unclear for now just what motion format it uses, but the resulting Live Photos consist of a 12-megapixel photo and additional sidecard data that's roughly the equivalent of another 12-megapixel photo. Consequently, each motion picture taken with Apple's Live Pictures takes up double the storage space of a standard 12-megapixel photo.
