Compress Live Photos

A Live Photo isn't one image — it's a bundle. When you press the shutter with Live mode on, the iPhone captures a full-resolution still (a HEIC image) plus about 1.5 seconds of video before and after the moment (a MOV file, with audio). The Photos app stitches these together so the picture "moves" when you press and hold. That extra motion is charming, but it means every Live Photo carries a short video clip riding alongside the still.

That's why a Live Photo typically weighs 2–3× what a normal photo does. A regular HEIC still might be 2MB; the same shot as a Live Photo can be 5–8MB once the MOV is included. Multiply that across a camera roll of several thousand photos — most iPhones shoot Live by default — and you're looking at gigabytes of storage consumed largely by video you may never actually watch. Compressing targets exactly that overhead.

People are often baffled that a phone with "only photos on it" is somehow full. Live Photos are a big part of the answer. Because the motion is on by default, almost every casual shot you take is secretly a still plus a video, and those video portions accumulate silently. A year of everyday photography can quietly bury several gigabytes of MOV data in your library that you'd never miss if it were gone.

It gets worse with iCloud: if you pay for storage, those bloated Live Photos are eating your paid quota too, and they make every backup and sync slower and heavier. Compressing the video portion — or stripping it entirely where you only care about the still — reclaims that space both on the device and in the cloud, often without you ever noticing a visual difference.

The smart way to shrink a Live Photo isn't to crush the picture — it's to be selective about where the savings come from. The still image is what you'll print, post, and look at, so it's kept at high quality. The bulk of the weight, though, is the MOV clip, and video is far more compressible than a single sharp photo. Re-encoding that clip with modern settings (a more efficient codec and a sensible bitrate for a 3-second loop) can halve its size while the motion still plays back smoothly.

The result is a Live Photo that looks and moves essentially the same but lands 40–60% smaller. For most people the difference is invisible to the naked eye, because the eye is far more forgiving of compression in a brief moving clip than in a still you'll scrutinise. You keep the "live" magic and lose the dead weight.

Not every Live Photo deserves to stay live. If you love the motion — a kid laughing, a wave breaking, a candle being blown out — compressing the clip is the right call: smaller file, same effect. But for the bulk of ordinary shots (a receipt, a whiteboard, a product photo), the motion adds nothing and the MOV is pure overhead. In those cases, converting to a plain still saves the most space of all.

If you decide you only want the picture, our Live Photo to JPG and LIVP to JPG tools pull out the still and discard the video entirely — the maximum possible size reduction. Compressing here is the middle path: you keep the Live Photo as a Live Photo, but trimmed down. Pick based on whether the motion is worth its weight for that particular shot.

It accepts the formats Live Photos actually come in: .livp (the packaged Live Photo you get when you export or share one), .heic (the still on its own), and .mov (the motion clip on its own). Drop in whichever you have — a whole batch is fine — and the compressed versions come back ready to download, bundled into a ZIP when there are several.

And it's private by design: the processing happens on your device rather than on a server you have to trust with your personal moments. There's no sign-up, no email, no watermark, and no upload queue — which also means there's no externally imposed file-size cap and large batches finish as fast as your own hardware can manage.