How do I remove the video of a Live Photo permanently?

Hey MPU,

apparently the additional video information of a Live Photo can take up to 2MB each.
Oftentimes I forget to turn Live Photos off, if I’m just taking quick snapshots of things with my phone

If you edit a Live Photo in the Photos app on iOS you’ll have additional buttons in the top area of the screen to toggle audio on/off or deactive the Live Photo function for that particular photo. This does however not remove the video/audio from the Live Photo. It will just stop the auto playback upon long-pressing the photo and will not play the quick animation when opening the photo in the gallery.

Is there a way to remove the video entirely from the photo to recover the storage space that all those videos of Live Photos take up that were unnecessarily shot?

Thanks a lot in advance :slight_smile:

Just to confirm you can convert them into still images. Is that what you are looking for?

Well, a Live Photo consists of two parts. A short video and a still image in full resolution.
All Live Photos are shown in the smart folder “Live Photos” of the Photos app.

The issue is that the video part of the photo can’t be deleted. As described above the toggle button in the edit view of a Live Photo will only disable the Live Photo playback functions (see above), but not remove the up to 2MB of video data.

Exactly, you can duplicate the photo into still image and delete the original one. Wouldn’t that be a solution?

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Maybe you can try Lean? I have used it in the past and found it to be pretty useful.

Edit:
Well, maybe it doesn’t do good work anymore. No recent positive reviews, so maybe wave off this one? Sorry!

Oh, I never noticed that it asks one to duplicate as a still image. Thanks a lot!

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