How to hear the sound recorded with a live photo on iOS

Live photos have been around for quite a while now and there is a feature in the stock Photos app that lets you convert the live photo into a video. This video has sound which means the live photo had it too. When you play a live photo though, the sound doesn’t play with it, regardless of the volume setting of your device. Here’s how you can hear the sound recorded with a live photo without converting it to a video.

Sound with live Photo

The volume switches don’t control the sound that you hear in live photos. Instead, the silent switch does. If your phone is usually on silent, which is how most people keep them, you likely don’t know how sound works with these photos. Use the switch on the side and exit silent mode.

Open the Photos app and tap and hold on a live photo to play it. The sound will now play with the photo. Make sure that, after you exit silent mode, you haven’t reduced the volume for media to zero. Use the volume up button on the side to increase the volume and set it to anything above zero.

That’s really the only trick there is to listening to sound with a live photo.

If you’re wondering whether or not you can capture a live photo without sound, that isn’t an option. A live photo is only 2 seconds, or less in length so it isn’t a large file but removing the audio would make it smaller. If that’s your goal, you can save the photo as a GIF. The quality won’t be lost as tends to happen with GIF files, but the volume will be removed since the GIF format does not support it. Also, since it’s a GIF, it will play from start to end automatically. You won’t have to tap and hold on the image like you have to with a live photo to view the animation.

If you’d like to share the live photo with the sound, but the person you’re sharing it with does not have an iOS device, you can do one of two things. First, try sending them the live photo, as is. Whatever device your recipient views the live photo on may support it, you never know. The other option is to just convert it into a video. You can do this directly from the Photos app. The option is in the share menu of a live photo.

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Fatima Wahab

Fatima has been writing for AddictiveTips for six years. She began as a junior writer and has been working as the Editor in Chief since 2014. Fatima gets an adrenaline rush from figuring out how technology works, and how to manipulate it. A well-designed app, something that solves a common everyday problem and looks

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