Tumblr launches support for Apple’s Live Photos on the web, releases tool to let other services do the same

Apple’s Live Photos were introduced with the iPhone 6s last year and have slowly made their way to third-party apps and services. One area that has lagged in support for Live Photos, however, is the web. This is primarily due to the fact that Apple doesn’t offer a first-hand solution for adding Live Photos to websites. Tumblr, however, has taken a roundabout approach to supporting the feature and is rolling it out today.

In a blog post, Tumblr announced the feature, noting that whenever you see the Live Photo icon on an image, you can click and hold on the image to bring it to life. Just like on iOS, the Live Photos support sound when activated, as well.

That’s right! Live Photos work on the web now. Whenever you see that famous Live Photo icon, click and hold to make them swing.

While Tumblr didn’t specify how exactly it’s implementing Live Photos on the web in its announcement, an article from TechCrunch offers up more details. Apparently, Tumblr is using the Laphs solution to implement the feature. Laphs stands for Live Anywhere Photos. This means that the .jpeg and .mov files from the Live Photo are combined to recreate the effect.

In addition to implementing Live Photos to its service, Tumblr is also releasing a set of tools to allow other developers to do the same. Ideally, this means that we’ll start to see more web sites begin to support Live Photos.

Tumblr was the first third-party service to bring Live Photos support to its iOS app. On Tumblr, GIFs are hugely popular and given the similarities that Live Photos carry to GIFs, it’s not surprising to see that the company has been heavily focused on the format since its release last year.

You can try out Live Photos on the web by heading to Tumblr’s blog post. To activate the Live Photo, click and hold on the image. The process isn’t perfect at this point, but it’s there nonetheless. Interestingly, clicking the photo (and not holding) simply brings the image up in a larger window, with the Live Photo aspect seemingly disappearing. Try it out here.