Last updated: August 2026

The short answer

Live Photo is Apple's name. Motion Photo is Google's. Both give you a still image plus a short video of the moment around it. The difference is where the video lives: Apple keeps it in a second file, Google hides it inside the photo.

How each format is actually put together.
  Apple Live Photo Google Motion Photo
Introduced iPhone 6s, 2015 Pixel 2, 2017 (as Motion Photos)
Files on disk Two — a HEIC or JPEG still and a separate MOV video One — a single JPEG
Where the video is Alongside the photo, linked by a shared asset identifier in the metadata Appended to the end of the JPEG, after the image data
How a reader finds it Matches the identifier on both files Reads XMP metadata at the front of the JPEG saying how many bytes back from the end the video starts
Clip length About 3 seconds, centred on the shutter Set by the camera app — commonly 1.5 to 3 seconds
Audio Yes Usually yes, depending on the app
Survives being copied as one file No — copy the photo alone and the motion is gone Yes — there is only one file to copy

What is inside an Apple Live Photo

An iPhone writes two files and remembers that they belong together. The still is a HEIC (or JPEG, depending on your settings), and next to it sits a QuickTime .MOV holding roughly three seconds of video. Neither file contains the other. What ties them is an identifier written into the metadata of both, which the Photos app matches up.

That design is clean inside Apple's ecosystem and fragile outside it. Almost every route off the phone — a chat app, a web upload, dragging one file to a computer — moves the still and leaves the MOV behind. Nothing is corrupted; the second half simply never travels.

What is inside a Google Motion Photo

A Motion Photo is one JPEG that a normal image viewer opens as an ordinary photo, because the extra data sits after the point where JPEG decoders stop reading. The video — an MP4 — is glued onto the end of the file.

Near the front of the same file is an XMP metadata block that says the video is there and where it begins. In practice it carries two vocabularies, because readers were built at different times:

  • GCamera:MicroVideoOffset — the older attribute, giving the video's length in bytes. Since the video is the last thing in the file, that number is also how far back from the end it starts.
  • GCamera:MotionPhoto plus a Container:Directory — the current form, which describes the file as a list of items: the image first, then the video with its exact byte length.

Write both and any reader that understands either one will play the photo. Write neither and you just have a JPEG with some junk on the end.

This is the practical test of any Android "live photo" app: if it leaves a .jpg and a .mp4 sitting side by side in your gallery, it has built Apple's structure without Apple's Photos app to hold it together — and no Android gallery will join them back up. Live Camera writes the embedded Motion Photo instead.

What happens when you send one across

iPhone Live Photo → Android

You will almost always receive the still only. AirDrop to an Android phone isn't available, and every other path — Messages, WhatsApp, email, a cloud link — tends to send the single image. Copy both files across manually over a cable and you can view them, but they arrive as an unrelated photo and video, not as one moving photo.

Android Motion Photo → iPhone

Better, because there is only one file to send. Recent versions of iOS and the Google Photos app on iOS recognise Motion Photos and play them. Some other iOS apps will treat it as a flat JPEG and show the still — which is a graceful failure, not a broken file.

Either one → a social network

Expect a still. Uploads are re-encoded to strip metadata and save space, and the moving part is exactly the kind of thing that gets stripped. If the movement is the point, send a GIF or an actual video instead.

So which is better?

For staying alive outside its home app, the Motion Photo design wins: one file, nothing to lose in transit. Apple's two-file approach gives higher quality video and cleaner editing inside Photos, at the cost of being easy to break apart.

On Android the choice is made for you — the Motion Photo is the format the platform's gallery apps read, so it is the one worth writing.