Last updated: August 2026

Disclosure: we make one of the apps on this page, Live Camera. We have tried to describe the alternatives the way we would want ours described — and the first recommendation below is to not install anything at all.

First: you may already have this

Before installing anything, open your phone's own camera app and look along the top row of icons for a Motion Photo control — a rounded square with a small play triangle.

Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel phones have it. If yours does, use it: it is free, it is integrated with your gallery, and it saves in the format every Android gallery reads. Here is where Samsung hides the button.

Most Xiaomi, Redmi, OPPO, vivo, realme, Motorola and Nothing phones do not have it. That is when an app is worth installing.

The three kinds of app

Kind 1 — Camera apps that capture a moment

These replace your camera and record a short clip around each shot, the way an iPhone does. This is what most people mean by a live photo app.

The thing to check before installing any of them: what does it actually save? Many leave you with a JPEG and a separate MP4 sitting next to each other in your gallery. That looks fine inside the app and falls apart everywhere else — no Android gallery joins two files back into one moving photo, so the photo you send to someone is just a photo. The apps worth using write a real Motion Photo, with the video embedded in the image file.

Our own Live Camera is in this category. It records 1.5 or 3 seconds around each shot, applies filters to the video as well as the still, lets you promote any frame to be the cover, and writes an embedded Motion Photo so Google Photos plays it without the app installed. It is free with ads, with a subscription that removes them.

Kind 2 — Apps that animate a still photo

VIMAGE, Zoetropic, Werble and others in this family take a photo you already have and add movement to it — drifting clouds, rippling water, a moving sky. Some are genuinely impressive.

But they are not live photo apps, whatever the store listing says. There is no captured moment; the movement is invented after the fact. If what you want is the half-second before someone laughed, these cannot give it to you. If what you want is an eye-catching effect on a landscape, they are the right tool and a camera app is not.

Kind 3 — Converters

These take a Live Photo that already exists — usually one that came from an iPhone — and turn it into a GIF or a video. Google's own Motion Stills was the best-known of these before it was discontinued.

Useful if you have moving photos and need them in a different format. Useless if you want to take one, since they do not capture anything. Note that most of the conversion work can be done without an app at all: Google Photos exports the video, and on an iPhone the Photos app has Save as Video built in.

How to choose in ten seconds

Match what you want to the kind of app that does it.
What you want What you need
Photos that keep the moment around them Your phone's built-in Motion Photo, or a camera app that writes the same format
Movement added to an old photo An animation app — a camera app cannot do this
An iPhone Live Photo turned into something sendable No app: convert it on the iPhone
A looping GIF from a moving photo An export from the app that took it

Warning signs in a store listing

  • Screenshots that show an iPhone. A surprising number of Android listings in this category illustrate the feature with iOS screenshots, which tells you how much the app was tested on Android.
  • No mention of Motion Photo anywhere. An app that captures moving photos properly will say what format it saves, because it is the hard part. Silence usually means two loose files.
  • Reviews saying "the movement disappears when I send it". That is the two-file problem, described by someone who ran into it.
  • A watermark on exports unless you pay. Common in the animation category; worth knowing before you spend an evening on a video you cannot use.
  • Permissions that make no sense. A camera app needs camera, microphone and media access. It does not need your contacts or your location.

The honest summary

If your phone already has Motion Photo, use it and install nothing. If it does not, pick a camera app that writes an embedded Motion Photo rather than a photo-plus-video pair — that single detail decides whether your moving photos still move a year from now, on a different phone, in someone else's gallery.