Migrating to Android when you are on iPhone involves giving up on certain things, including your Live Photos accumulated over years. Fortunately, Google has an idea to prevent you from losing them. Explanations.
For several years now, Google and Apple have made it easier to migrate between operating systems. For its part, the Apple brand has, for example, developed a dedicated application to transfer your most important data, namely Move to iOS.
This app allows you to transfer all of your messages, photos, contacts and even your favorite display settings to your new device.
However, not everything is rosy when it comes to moving from one OS to another. iOS being a closed ecosystem, the migration of certain elements can be problematic. This is particularly the case for Live Photos. If you’re an iPhone addict, you probably know them.
The problem with Live Photos when switching from iOS to Android
For others, we can summarize Live Photos like animated photos. As Apple describes on its official website, “A Live Photo records actions that occur just before and after taking a photo, including audio”.
Let us add that Live Photo is enabled by default. So, unless you have disabled it, an iPhone owner will likely have dozens and dozens of Live Photos accumulated in their photo library in the Photos app. However, when an iPhone user decides to migrate to Android, Google does not offer turnkey solutions for transferring your Live Photos.
For now, the only alternative is to transfer your Live Photos to Google Photos. The platform then takes care of transforming them into Motion Photos, the equivalent of the Mountain View firm. The problem is that this method suggests that you have enough storage capacity available on your Google One account. With a free profile, you only have 15 GB. Not sure if this is enough to store all your photos.
Google has an idea to save your Live Photos
However, as detailed by our colleagues at Android Authority, Google is currently working on a solution. In the APK files of the latest update of Data Transfer Tool (editor’s note: the Google app dedicated to transferring data between smartphones), journalists noticed references to an upcoming feature: LivePhotoRestore.java.
As you will have understood, Google intends to integrate into its application a tool to ensure the transfer of all your Live Photos and their transformation into Motion Photos during your migration.