Facebook Starts Rolling Out Support For Apple's Live Photos
It's been just under 3 months since Apple debuted “Live Photos” with the iPhone 6s and, slowly but surely, big third parties are finding ways to integrate them. Tumblr picked them up just days ago... and now Live Photos …
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple introduced Live Photos with the iPhone 6s roughly three months ago, and platform adoption has been incremental: Tumblr brought sharing of Live Photos and 3D Touch to its iOS app just over a week before this rollout. Facebook adding support makes it the largest social network so far to handle the format natively.
The move fits Facebook's broader push on richer mobile photo posting — it had already been testing a Snapchat-style uploader with text overlays and swipeable filters for iOS earlier that year.
First-order effects
- iPhone 6s owners can now post and view Live Photos directly on Facebook without exporting static images, making Facebook one of the first big third-party homes for the format alongside Tumblr.
- Tumblr's early-mover advantage as the leading Live Photos-friendly network shrinks once the far larger Facebook audience gains native support.
Second-order effects
- Other major networks face pressure to decide how they handle Live Photos — convert, preserve, or ignore — since a format users can share on Facebook and Tumblr becomes an expectation elsewhere.
Third-order effects
- If adoption keeps spreading, the endgame is cross-platform normalization of the format: Tumblr eventually extended Live Photos to the web and open-sourced its tooling for other developers, and years later Twitter chose conversion to GIF while preserving original JPEG quality for web uploads — suggesting platforms will settle into preserve-or-convert strategies rather than rejecting the format outright.
The trend: Apple's camera features are increasingly becoming shared platform standards, with each major social network forced to pick an integration strategy rather than opt out.