A new jailbreak tweak called PhotosLive enables Live Photos like functionality on older iPhone models. Live Photos is one of the new features in iPhone 6s and 6s Pus which works with 3D Touch.
When taking a photo, with Live Photos enabled, a small video is recored before and after the photo is taken. This makes the photo ‘alive’ and can be viewed in the Photos app or on other Apple devices. Live Photos can also be set as backgrounds on iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus and Apple Watch. It is not yet clear how whether Apple will allow older iPhones to set Live Photos as their backgrounds since they are similar to dynamic wallpapers.
Since previous generation iPhones don’t have 3D Touch, they do not get Live Photos but this is where the jailbreak community steps in. PhotosLive replicates all the Live Photos functionality from iPhone 6s and ports it back to all iPhones running iOS 8 and above.
Once you have the tweak installed, all you need to do is take photos with the PhotosLive option turned on. They will be saved in Photos and can be viewed as small movies right within the app. The same photos can also be setup as background on the lockscreen, which can be played back with a long press.
PhotosLive works a bit differently than Live Photos i.e. all the data is saved within the JPEG and not as separate movie file as with the former. As per the developer:
Keep them in your library or sync them and delete them, maintaining the live data forever. Even if you sync it to your computer and delete the photo from the device, when you sync it back, it will still be live! The Live data is hardcoded in the JPEG photo itself, so it is maintained across Syncs, Photo Sharing, Photo Stream, iCloud, sending across devices via SMS, email, etc!
For sharing on social media, the photo can be exported as an animated GIF.
Here is a video of the tweak in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cX-Mb2oh7g
The tweak is available in BigBoss repo for a special price of $1.99 during launch week and will be $2.99 after that.
Read next: Get 3D Touch like functionality on older iPhones with this jailbreak tweak
