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Can we download movie part of a Live photo?

I'm really happy that Dropbox now supports live photos. Having them automatically upload from my iPhone and be visible on dropbox.com is working great!

What I'm not seeing is how I can get the movie portion of the live photos onto my laptop. When the live photo is synced to my computer I only see the .heic file, I'd also expect to somehow be able to access the .mp4 file, even if I had to take some sort of extra step.

How do I download the movie part of the file? Can this somehow be made part of the automatic sync feature? Can the web UI have a button added to access the movie?

I also looked at the developer API docs and it wasn't clear to me if the API support working with live photos. Am I missing something?

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Accepted answers

zacw

The HEIC file contains the video internally (as a video atom). The easiest way to extract it is using `exiftool`. With a file named `example.heic` you can extract the video using:

exiftool -b -MotionPhotoVideo example.heic >video.mov

This will produce a video.mov next to the file.

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Jay

Hi @miccolis, thanks for messaging the Community.

Are you able to see the movie file version of the Live photo on the Dropbox site, or just the heic file?

Any other info or screenshots would be helpful!

zacw

The HEIC file contains the video internally (as a video atom). The easiest way to extract it is using `exiftool`. With a file named `example.heic` you can extract the video using:

exiftool -b -MotionPhotoVideo example.heic >video.mov

This will produce a video.mov next to the file.

miccolis

@zacw thanks so much for the pointer - this is exactly what I'm looking for!

One follow up question - if I'm looking to migrate live photos into Dropbox from Google Photos, is there anything I'd need to do to preserve compatibility? ...or is this all standardized now and the Google Photos versions will just work?

zacw

Although Google doesn't have any devices that support taking HEIC photos, the format we chose for Live Photos in HEIC seems to be supported by Google Photos and closely mirrors that of Samsung devices. It's likely intentional that it works in Google Photos. Unfortunately there's no real official standard; e.g., Apple does not have or use a single-file representation of Live Photos.

The most reliable way of importing into Google Photos is via their app which consumes from the Photos app. You can export Live Photos from the Dropbox app into Photos.app and it'll preserve the Live Photo status, too.

miccolis

Ok, my goal is actually the other way around - now that Dropbox supports live photos I'd like to export all my photos from Google Photos and move them over into Dropbox. Any pointers on doing that are welcome.

Walter

In that case, I'd recommend downloading them from Google Photos and uploading them to Dropbox manually @miccolis

I hope this helps!

zacw

Getting Live Photos out of Google Photos is quite hard -- I believe Google's Takeout provides you with separate photo and video files. I think your best bet would be to export them in Google Photos to Photos.app then allow Camera Uploads in the Dropbox app to process them.

Theresa

Hi there and welcome back to the Dropbox Community, it's great to have you here. I’m glad you reached out with this question it’s a great one and I know others might be wondering the same!

I’m Theresa 👩‍💻 , one of the Community Managers here at Dropbox HQ. I love joining conversations like this or starting new ones across the board.Since you’re working with Live Photos, I’d love to know... how do you usually use Dropbox when it comes to managing photos or videos? Always curious to hear how people incorporate Dropbox into their workflows.

Looking forward to hearing more,

T😸 (Dropbox Community Manager)

miccolis

Hi Theresa - I'm using the camera uploads feature on my iPhone and have been, basically since the old Dropbox Carousel app. However since live photos became a thing I've also been using Google Photos and basically uploading photos twice. The only reason I used Google Photos was to preserve these live photos.

My original question was kinda a side-quest from what is a effectively a migration project. I was trying to understand how live photos were stored to help me verify what I need to migrate.

Now that Dropbox has support for live photos I need to reconcile these my two (Google photos & Dropbox Camera Uploads) divergent collections of photos. I'm thinking that I'll need to effectively re-upload all photos that are still on my phone to get all those live photos up in Dropbox. To do that I'm planning of disabling automatic uploads, renaming the exiting camera uploads folder, and then re-enabling.

That will work for all the photos that are still on my phone, but for older photos I'm thinking I'll need to identify the live photos that are in Google Photos. I think I can constrain that to a specific time period - after I started using live photos and before the photos that are on my current phone. To do that I suspect I'll need to write some code that inspects the photos in Google and then, if they're live photos, copies them over the existing photo in Dropbox