Livp.app

Turn videos and GIFs into iPhone Live Photos in your browser. Keep personal media on your device, choose a cover frame, and export a paired photo and video.

Comment

Livp.app — turn a video into a real Live Photo

Inspiration

A short video can hold a moment that a still photo misses. Turning it into an iPhone Live Photo should not require uploading personal footage or installing another conversion app. Livp.app brings that workflow into the browser, with an emphasis on privacy and keeping the original media intact.

What it does

Livp.app is a toolkit for creating, extracting and sharing moving images:

  • Turn MP4 or MOV videos into Live Photo pairs and choose the cover frame.
  • Convert animated GIFs into Live Photos.
  • Extract the video or a JPG image from a Live Photo.
  • Export animated GIFs and create Boomerang or reverse loops.

The conversion tools process files locally on the user's device. The video-to-Live-Photo workflow preserves the original video samples without re-encoding; GIF and loop creation use their own encoding workflows. The exported photo and video come with an import guide for bringing the pair into iPhone Photos.

How it is built

The interface uses Next.js, React, TypeScript and Tailwind CSS. The core Live Photo generator works directly with byte arrays in the browser rather than sending source media to a conversion server.

A Live Photo needs more than a JPEG next to a movie. The generator writes matching content identifiers into the image and video, adds the timed metadata that identifies the still-image moment, and checks the resulting structure before offering the files for download. Browser media APIs support previewing videos and choosing a cover frame.

Challenges and lessons

The difficult part is interoperability. A movie that plays in a browser is not necessarily a valid Live Photo in Apple Photos. Container brands, track identifiers, metadata placement and media-data offsets all matter. The implementation preserves the original container brand, handles track-ID collisions, and adjusts offsets when metadata changes the file layout.

This work reinforced a practical lesson: successful playback is only one check. The photo and video must also carry the right relationship for the destination application to recognize them as a single moving photo.

What makes the project useful

Livp.app combines a browser-only conversion workflow with attention to the details of the Live Photo format. People can try five free conversions per day without creating an account. Paid membership adds unlimited conversions, batch processing and an ad-free experience.

Try it at livp.app: choose a short video, select a cover frame, export the pair and follow the iPhone import guide.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates