Updated
How to Turn a Video into a Live Photo on iPhone
With Actions
- Install Actions, and open it once.
- In the Shortcuts app, tap the add button to make a new shortcut.
- Add the “Select Photos” action.
- Add the “Make Live Photo from Video” action of Actions. It gets the selected video. To use another frame than the first as the still image, tap the arrow in the action, and enter the time in seconds.
- Run the shortcut, and pick a video. The Live Photo is saved in Photos.
It keeps the frame rate, the location, and the date of the video, and does not compress it. It takes MP4 and MOV videos. A shortcut action on iPhone only gets 30 seconds to run, so a very long video may not work. If the actions do not show in Shortcuts, restart your iPhone.
A Live Photo made from a video does not move when you use it as a Lock Screen wallpaper. This is a limitation of iOS.
Get Actions
Additional actions for the Shortcuts app
Free
- Platforms
- macOS, iOS, visionOS
- Requires
- macOS, iOS, or visionOS 26 or later
- Category
- Utilities
- Released
- October 2021
- Privacy
- No personal data collected
- Updated
- June 2026
- Version
- 4.2.0
- Size
- 29 MB
- US App Store rating
- 4.8/5 (529 ratings)
Without an app
iPhone has no built-in way to turn a video into a Live Photo. Instead, take a Live Photo with the Camera app: it records 1.5 seconds before and after you take the picture. Apple’s instructions.
The Loop and Bounce effects of Photos go the other way: they turn a Live Photo into a short video. The shortcut is for a video that you already have.