In my story about the iPhone 6s Plus earlier today, I mentioned how apps to clean up Live Photos and re-save them as static images were about to hit the App Store. The first one, Lean by Tiny Whale (the creators of Lively), has been released today for free, and it’s a good example of the tools developers are making to enhance the Live Photos experience.
Lean lets you save a live photo as a static one with no video and original metadata intact. The app is extremely basic: it launches to a grid of Live Photos from your local library, which you can select (even multiple ones at once), and then clean up with the tap of a button. The clean-up process consists of a static version of the photo saved in the same position as the original – Lean doesn’t create a copy, and it keeps EXIF, GPS, and Creation Date data after the conversion.
There are two nice touches in Lean: it tells you how much storage you’ve saved thanks to the app in the settings, and it allows you to peek at Live Photos from the main view. I’d like to see more options to filter specific subsets of Live Photos: toggles to filter by time period or location would make it easier to find and clean up Live Photos you’re no longer interested in.
As I argued in my 6s Plus article, I’m going to keep Live Photos always enabled from now on. Tools like Lean will come in handy to enjoy the best of both worlds: knowing that I’ll never end up with static photos, but also having a way to quickly convert Live Photos back to normal ones and save space.
Lean is available for free on the App Store.
