How to scrub through the video of a Live Photo

Learn how to expand the image scrubber into a handy video timeline when viewing a Live Photo in the Photos app on your iPhone or iPad.

Holding iPhone with Live Photo of a river on the screen

A Live Photo records what happens 1.5 seconds before and after you take a picture and is useful for those times when you’d like to capture a moment with movement and sound.

What I have discovered purely by accident is that you can transform the scrubber in the Photos app into a Live Photos video timeline in a flash. This lets you go through the entire Live Photo without the sound. Here’s how.

Scrub through the video of a Live Photo

1) Open the Photos app on your iPhone or iPad and tap Albums.

2) Scroll down to the Media Types heading and tap Live Photos. Every Live Photo you capture gets automatically stored in this built-in smart album.

3) In the image thumbnail scrubber at the bottom of the Photos interface, tap once on the thumbnail of the Live Photo that you’re currently viewing.

Tapping the thumbnail of a Live Photo on iPad

4) You will notice that the Live Photo thumbnail has expanded into a handy video timeline.

Live Photo thumbnail expanded into a scrollable strip

You can now slide your finger horizontally across the video timeline to go back and forward one frame at a time. Let go, and the timeline bounces back to the Live Photo’s key photo/frame.

Scrub through the Live Photo timeline in iPad Photos app

Being able to pause and scrub through the video of a Live Photo is very handy.

For starters, this lets you relive your Live Photos in an entirely different way than pressing the screen, which simply plays the Live Photos’ video once. The video timeline is also great for comparing two similar Live Photos on a frame-by-frame basis. And visually, it makes it very easy to see the segment of the Live Photo that its key frame was derived from.

If you don’t like the still frame of your Live Photo, tap Edit, select the right frame using the thumbnail scrubber at the bottom, then tap Make Key Photo.

Make Key Photo option when editing a Live Photo on iPhone

You can turn Live Photo mode on or off by tapping its icon in the Camera app.

Live Photos is on by default. Some people are confused that closing the Camera app and re-opening it shows Live Photos back on. You can have your Camera remember your preferences by setting it to preserve the previous Live Photos settings. Now when you turn Live Photo off in Camera, it will stay off until re-enabled manually.

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