A U.K. woman was photographed standing in a mirror where her reflections didn’t match, but not because of a glitch in the Matrix. Instead, it’s a simple iPhone computational photography mistake.
Ah yes, I remember noticing it would make like a short video instead of one picture, back when I had an iPhone. I turned that function off because I didn’t see the benefits.
That’s not what this is. I also turned that off, it’s called “Live Photo” or something like that. Honestly I find it to be a dumb feature.
What this is, is the iPhone taking a large number of images and stitching them together for better results.
It’s not dumb. It let’s you select the best moment within a 1-2 second margin after or before you took the picture.
No, these are literally just short videos. You interact with them like photos, you see them as photos, half the time people sending them think they are photos, but when you tap all the way into them they are a short video. They are absolutely not presented as a “choose your exact frame” pre-photo things, they are presented as photos.
Wrong. Pretty crazy, it does let you change which frame is the photo. Click edit, then hit the Live Photo icon next to “cancel”
That isnt the point of a Live Photo, that’s just a “feature.” Similar to how YouTube lets you choose a thumbnail for a video, but that’s not really the point of YouTube.
Per Apple support:
With Live Photos, your iPhone records what happens 1.5 seconds before and after you take a picture. Then you can pick a different key photo, add a fun effect, edit your Live Photo, and share with your family and friends.
So it’s actually the first example of what Live Photo is for.
If you didn’t even know about this, don’t feel bad. I’m an Apple fanboy and my daughter just showed me that it allowed you to do this “different key photo” last month. Kids are good for that.
I’m aware that’s it’s possible, but that isn’t part of the onboarding or anything. What I mean is, it’s an addon. It was never part of the original iteration, which was just “look moving Harry Potter photos.”
It’s a gimmick that doesn’t even work cross device, because it’s literally just a short video.
This story may be amusing, but it’s actually a serious issue if Apple is doing this and people are not aware of it because cellphone imagery is used in things like court cases. Relative positions of people in a scene really fucking matter in those kinds of situations. Someone’s photo of a crime could be dismissed or discredited using this exact news story as an example – or worse, someone could be wrongly convicted because the composite produced a misleading representation of the scene.
It should be. All computational photography has zero business being used in court
It’s a really cool discovery, but I don’t know how Apple is suppose to program against it.
What surprises me is how much of a time range each photo has to work with. Enough time for Tessa to put down one arm and then the other. It’s basically recording a mini-video and selecting frames from it. I wonder if turning off things like Live Photo (which retroactively starts the video a second or two before you actually press record) would force the Camera app to select from a briefer range of time.
Maybe combining facial recognition with post processing to tell the software that if it thinks it’s looking at multiple copies of the same person, it needs to time-sync the sections of frames chosen for the final photo. It wouldn’t be foolproof, but it would be better than nothing.
Who wants photos of a fake reality? Might as well just AI generate them.
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