The iPhone’s camera provides a photographic mode known as “live photos”. When you take a photo with this option enabled, the camera records, not just a single frame, but the equivalent of a 3-second video. The idea behind this is that, when editing your photos, you can scroll through the frames and choose the best one. It is useful when taking action photos, for example.

Call me old-fashioned, but I rarely use the “live” option. Tigger, on the other hand, uses it a lot. This enables her, on suitable occasions, to share with me what amounts to a short video of a scene that we have both experienced.

The problem, of course, is that WordPress knows nothing of “live photos” and treats them as ordinary single-frame stills. Therefore, if I want to to show the live photo as a moving picture, I have to convert it to video.

I have tried several ways of doing this but with limited success – remember that I now do all my blogging on the phone, using whatever photo editing tools are available for this.

You will have noticed, I am sure, that the “short videos” I have posted all suffered from a particular fault: they appeared dark on the blog. This was all the more annoying because they looked perfectly fine in the editor but then reverted to dark when posted.

I decided at last that it was time to call on some outside help. I downloaded an app called Lively and tried it out.

The app finds any live photos in your images folder and has three conversion modes: GIF, Movie and Frame. The first two are self-explanatory and the third, Frame, allows you to scroll through the frames and choose one.

For my first attempts, I chose Movie. The result looked fine… in the editor. When I displayed it in WordPress, however, the video went dark as before.

I nearly gave up at this point but then I decided to try the GIF option. Once more, the result looked fine in the editor. I ran it on WordPress and… it was fine there also! Success at last!

I have edited yesterday’s post so you can see the result for yourself. GIFs have the added advantage that they run automatically without you needing to click a button.

There is one small downside that you will probably also notice: the name of the app, in fairly large letters, appears in the picture. You can remove this by paying a small fee (£4.99, to be precise) and, despite being the skinflint that I am, I have tried to pay but, for whatever reason, my attempts keep failing.

I will keep trying and hoping to succeed. Then I will be able to say that I have finally cracked the “video problem”!

P.S. I have now managed to pay the fee to remove the app name from Lively (the previous failure was my own fault!). In future, GIFs made by the app from live photos will be unadorned but I will leave the name on yesterday’s GIFs as deserved advertising for the app!