iPhone Live Photos offer a magical portal to a happier time before coronavirus

Just like everybody else, I hate being stuck at home. But in the solitude that is my bedroom, my office, my scene, that video studio, I discovered thousands of little videos on my phone of my friends, family and even pets. [BLANK_AUDIO] So these little videos come from live photos. When you take one, it records one and a half seconds before, and one and a half seconds after. And it keeps this little three second memory on your phone. Now, now, this has been around a while. And there's even a version of it on Android called Motion Photos. But this isn't about Android versus iOS or Apple versus Samsung no. This is just about how a feature can actually kind of make it feel something. Yeah I know I know each time we hear tech companies equate the product into changing the world or it's going to revolutionize this or make you feel this way. You know what, most of time this is a lot of bull [NOISE]. But this time, well It worked, worked really well. But let me back up a bit. I live with two roommates who are wonderful, smart, intelligent, charismatic kind of animals. The nicest roommates you could hope for, but at Tennessee Williams illustrated so well has played Streetcar Named Desire. Putting a lot of people in a small space for a long time. Something's gonna boil over. I don't wanna if ands or buts. Now, what's the rest of the Let me be clear about this a little bit here. So that reference is actually gonna make a little more sense later on in the story. And to be honest, the only thing that's boiled over in my household so far is a little bit of pasta water. Because of all the anxiety that's engulfing our world right now. I've been spending Far more time in my room. It's my escape, it's my office, it's my video studio. And it reminds me of a meme I saw about someone working from home and it's a woman in pajamas and she's getting ready for bed and she's like, Well, time but get out of my daytime pajamas. And into my nighttime pajamas. And that's kind of what it is like being in this room. Sometimes I need to change it into the bedroom role where I don't have tech on I don't have my work computer on. Other times it's got to be an office. Other times, I've got to be ready to record a video with lights and sound and kind of everyone quiet And so far it's worked pretty well. But one day last week, I was really frustrated with working from home and I closed my computer and just grabbed my phone and I just wanted to see pictures of my family and friends who I hadn't seen in a while. And then I noticed that there's a collection called Live photos, and I had over 1300 of the life photos. I've never really given live photos of thought before you know they were just they're so excited just scroll through and I found this picture of my cat named Stella named after the character Streetcar Named Desire. I was working on it production Chicago years ago and I got her and it was a picture of Stella on my roommates heating pad just kind of napping. And when I push in, held on the photo She just came back to life. And this made me lose it. Is it my cat Stella he passed away last summer and it was really sad. And the fact that I could just push and hold on the photo and to see her spring back to life, and even let out a little tiny meow I [MUSIC] Just didn't know that kind of power existed and stuff like Live Photo. So I started scrolling through more photos looking for that little Live Photo circle icon on the top. And I found ones that still applying and looking at birds and then I was going through ones of friends and family. I found ones of when I interviewed the Giza and master killer from Wu Tang clan. We're awkwardly standing get ready to take a photo together. I found one where I took a picture with the Aflac Duck at CES. Yeah, so a lot of photos. Wow. [MUSIC] Okay, the only live photos I didn't look at whereas I found a couple pictures of an ex girlfriend and hey man I am not a monster for pain and suffering, so did not touch those. Now I realised I could just watch videos that I have on my cat Stella or the interview video I did with Wu Tang clan. It's a great video. Reza could watch those things but it's not the same effect but Live Photo does is capture these That's really mundane, these really small and like natural genuine moments that you don't even realize are happening as you take a photo. I think that's the underlying power of live photos now, when whoever at Apple named this product live photos, I don't think he or she had any idea that I'd be sitting here. Looking at photos of basically my cat coming back to life for three seconds. Yeah. Yeah, I went there. Now I'm sharing the story with you because it just brought me a wonderful amount of distraction and I imagine maybe on your Android phone or your iPhone that you have these motion photos you have these live photos And they're just waiting there with all these moments for you to discover. I guess in this time when there's so much uncertainty and we're being so isolated from the ones we love, just having that little bit of [BLANK_AUDIO] aliveness feels really good. And the end with a line from Streetcar Named Desire When Eunice tells Stella at the end. We've gotta keep on going honey, no matter what happens. We all gotta keep on going. [MUSIC]