Google develops cool tech to convert photos into GIF

The geeks have already gone gaga over Apple's Live photo feature, and now Google has developed a new app for iPhone that converts photos into GIFs, which is a rage on social media nowadays.

The app, called Motion Stills, is not the same as Live Photos and is much cooler than a basic GIF converter. Motion Stills uses its own video stabilization algorithms to take what might otherwise be a shaky Live Photo and turn it into a smooth GIF.

Google pioneered the technology by stabilizing hundreds of millions of videos and creating GIF animations from photo bursts.

"Our challenge was to take technology designed to run distributed in a data center and shrink it down to run even faster on your mobile phone. We achieved a 40x speedup by using techniques such as temporal subsampling, decoupling of motion parameters, and using Google Research’s custom linear solver, GLOP. We obtain further speed up and conserve storage by computing low-resolution warp textures to perform real-time GPU rendering, just like in a video game," Google said.

On our wa... SQUIRREL! 🐶 #motionstills @google pic.twitter.com/6Qk3hNwjqC

— Jonathan McKinstry (@jonathanmc07) June 7, 2016

The movie version. #MotionStills pic.twitter.com/NiePfxmdtl

— Leigh Reyes (@leighpod) June 8, 2016

Google notes multiple times that Motion Stills doesn't require any kind of data connection to work; all the processing is on-device. And no, you don't even need a Google account to use it. Once a GIF is made, you can send it to someone in a message, email, or share to another app. And Motion Stills also lets you track multiple Live Photos together. In that case, it creates a proper movie file (with audio) instead of a GIF. You can do that even if you're converting a single Live Photo, too.

Motion Photos is available for free from the App Store now. I've only tried it a couple times and don't really have any Live Photos that would seriously test the stabilization, but even so, this app probably just earned a permanent spot on my iPhone. And I'll probably keep Lively around in case Google's stabilization magic does weird things. Either way, to me, GIFs are better than Live Photos — unless you really need the sound.