Live Photos are eating your storage
A Live Photo is two files pretending to be one, and the half you never look at again is most of the size — which I did not know myself until I went looking.
What is actually stored
A Live Photo is a full-resolution still and a roughly three-second video with audio, captured 1.5 seconds either side of the shutter. The still is what you see in the grid. The video underneath it is why the file runs two to three times the size of an ordinary photo.
Multiply that by a few thousand photos and Live Photos become one of the largest single stores on a phone — nearly all of it footage nobody has ever gone back and watched.
Turning one back into a photo
The obvious route does not do what it looks like it does. Open the photo → Edit → tap the yellow LIVE badge → Off. That stops the photo animating. It does not touch the video underneath, so you save nothing at all.
To actually remove it, you have to create a new still and delete the original. On the phone: open the Live Photo, tap the LIVE menu, choose a Key Photo if you want a different frame, then Share → Duplicate → Duplicate as Still Photo. That gives you a plain photo. Delete the original Live Photo afterwards, then empty Recently Deleted.
That is four steps, for one photo — which is exactly why bulk tools exist for this.
Which ones to keep
Live Photos earn their size in a small set of cases and no others:
- Anything moving — children, animals, water, a candle.
- Group shots, where the extra frames let you pick one with everyone's eyes open.
- Long Exposure, which needs the video to work at all.
A document, a whiteboard, a receipt, a screenshot of a screen, a static landscape — none of those need three seconds of video attached, and that is most of them.
Stop making new ones
Camera → tap the concentric-circles icon to switch Live off. Left alone, it resets back on each time, unless you tell it not to: Settings → Camera → Preserve Settings → Live Photo. Turn that on once and the camera remembers.
One warning before bulk conversion
Flattening is not reversible. The video half is gone for good, and the thirty-day Recently Deleted safety net covers the deleted original, not the frames. Anything with a person or an animal in it, look at first.
Sift cleans up photo storage. See what it does →