Motion Stills

- July 19, 2017

Everyone

Photography

( 1,703)

Description

Motion Stills is an app from Google Research that lets you capture short videos and transform them into beautiful cinemagraphs or sweeping cinematic pans using our advanced stabilization and rendering technology. Create looping GIFs or combine clips into movies that you can share with your friends! Use Motion Stills to:
• Capture a short 3s clip with a simple tap or condense up to a minute of video into an easy-to-watch clip using the Fast Forward mode.
• Share your Motion Stills as looping GIFs or videos directly with your friends.
• Create movies by combining clips with a simple swipe to the right.
• Browse your recorded clips in a stream, or flip through them one-by-one and watch them auto-play.

Reviews

3.7

1,703 total

5 803

4 276

3 187

2 134

1 303

Brian Matei

Cool idea, but doesn't make much sense here. On iOS, "Live Photos" are baked in, so Motion Stills just made them better. Here, you can't import clips or easily capture from your camera app. The GIFs are low resolution, and the videos are pointless (since you can capture a higher res video normally). Instead of this, add Motion Stills capture into Google Camera (for those that want something like Live Photos) and the incredible stabilization into a Google video editor.

Google usually creates useful products, but definitely not impressed with this one. My wishlist is... 1. Length of capture should be user controlled. 2. It took some time to figure out how to delete a capture. Maybe have a menu option instead, or a trash can to tap on, although, I'm not sure if they're trying to go for the clean interface look. Otherwise, nice and basic. I like everything else about it.

Steven Tannickal

Awesome. About time Google finally bought it over to Android... Also why is this a separate app, this functionality can easily be incorporated into Google Photos or even the Google Camera app (which would be awesome). Everything created with Stills should auto upload to Google Photos (or at least provide an option). Right now we have to manually go and upload to Photos or export it to a folder that is set to sync with Photos. (I'm on a Nexus 6P, Android O Developer Preview 3)

Elyssa Mae

Love it. It's like boomerang but instead of pacing back and forth, it uses loop. Its stabilization is great as I am shaky when capturing, and the fast-forward is great, too. I hope you could develop the slo-mo next soon. It would be great for devices who doesn't have this feature. Cheers!

shivam ojha

Nice app bt could have been better if,1)App can be launched default with built in camera of my smartphone Lenovo Z2 Plus 2) Export to gif can be made easy coz it stucks every time 3) Motion stills must be uploaded automatically to Google photos. 4) Slow motion recorder must be supported.

Tony W

Pretty good app but I don't know ow why Google doesn't add basic features... Saving one by one is painful. This app should be integrated with Google photos. Also there is a bug... When selecting fast forward capture option, hitting the volume button will ignore the setting and do the motion still capturing instead

User reviews

Brian Matei August 4, 2017

July 27, 2017

Steven Tannickal July 20, 2017

Elyssa Mae July 22, 2017

shivam ojha July 23, 2017

Tony W July 31, 2017

Nicholas Vanrysseghem July 20, 2017

Love it! Clean, simple, beautiful. But...it doesn't automatically upload my GIF's to the Photos app? I have to upload them individually? And I can't delete the previous videos/GIF's? If this was integrated into the camera and photos app more intimately, it would make it so much better. Style, and usefulness, 10/10. Functionality 5/10.

Sachet Zode July 24, 2017

Great concept, and great execution. However the app is quite buggy and lags a lot on my Nexus 6P. Also, why is there no option to delete the motion stills? Some more development, and perhaps integration into the Google Camera and this app would be perfect.

Mark Tenet July 20, 2017

Works good for a nice basic animated gif. Would be awesome if you could implement the Samsung Galaxy camera feature of painting areas that you want animated or frozen as there is quite a bit of noise in certain scenarios. Also needs reverse looping where it loops by just reversing the video each time it hits the end point.

C2tha J2tha July 21, 2017

This is a great app...but it's missing a few things. It lacks the native ability to delete a single creation or multiple creations from within the app. And the ability to rename a gif & video would be much appreciated! Meanwhile it has excellent image stabilization & a great simple UI that's easy to use.

Jason M July 20, 2017

Cool app, but would be much better incorporated into the camera. My guess is I'll forget all about this app within a week. Also, why was this released first on iOS, with the Android version waiting almost a year to be released?! That's ridiculous.

Ace Ferdinand July 20, 2017

It works very well but doesn't offer anything Earth shattering. It should definitely be integrated with the camera app as a new feature or an add-on. One thing that needs to be added ASAP is the ability to delete files; that should be a basic feature

Kundan Singh July 20, 2017

Nice but still with loads of bugs. Not able to save motions in video's, whenever I am trying to save in video's format app is restarting. When saving in GIF format it's getting stuck at 97% always

David Munoz July 20, 2017

Works well enough for a first attempt. You can delete pictures despite what other reviews state (swipe them away). The stabilization does distort the image and make the picture swim, but not terribly in most cases. Would be nice to have a few stabilizer options.

Gaurav Sharma July 23, 2017

This app is great but it have to be improved more. The common thing is missing is that the flash icon is not there means we can't capture in night and in day the the image that we captures is sooo dim. Please improve that things!

Latrell Jennings Vlogs July 20, 2017

Cool app and all, but it makes no since why it took Google so long to get it on Android. Google, you own Android. Your not showing that you want to compete. That's kind of frustrating. You did the same thing with Gboard. Why?

ebinu abdul July 21, 2017

Google takes almost one year to introduce this app on Android after it's release on iOS. I think Google wants us to adopt iOS to avoid Monopoly..Isnt it??? Eventhough app does what it says it crashes several times.

Dennis Rice August 18, 2017

Great first step. Only current complaint is that when gifs are exported, the timestamp is the time of export, not the time it was taken. Will be interesting to see how this app evolves, but useful additional features would be ability to save to sd card, ability to save directly as gif, and longer time lapses.

Jason Wells July 20, 2017

My LG V20 has two front-facing cams. This app only toggles between my main rear cam & my front wide-angle cam, but won't toggle with my regular front-facing cam. Disappointing.

Jared Blode July 24, 2017

The app needs to become more useful! For example why does the app not let you take horizontal hyper-lapses. Secondly the apps two features aren't very useful maybe they would be more useful if they were just built in additions to the Google camera. Also the design whilst simple isn't intuitive and doesn't really reflect the material design standards of other Google apps.

Giles Holbrow July 21, 2017

Love the idea, app is just buggy. The exported videos have some sort of glitch where it freezes up, or the video plays back like 1.7x per file. Also the export.mp4 harcoded filename messes with my phone, would be great to add another number or timestamp or something

Stefanie Daniella July 20, 2017

incompatible with andoid 6+ (galaxy tab s 10") camera view is always 90-drees sideways no matter which way i orient my camera (lock or unlock orientation)!!! (uninstall!!!) prefer to use my galaxy s5 smartphone but app is unavailable below android 5 :P

Victor I. July 20, 2017

Simple app but it does a good job. Issues 1. No option to delete images. 2. 1/3 of screen is blank when editing. 3. Very limited editing options 4. Crashes when going back from editing page if device kills background activity. 5. Can't use videos already in my gallery

WJeat 文杰的声音 August 12, 2017

So many bugs. The camera frame size is distort in my xiaomi mi3 phone. But great potential. Will keep it and wait for next update.

jeremy stewart July 20, 2017

Cool in theory but it crashes when sharing to share a good portion of the time and also kept loading the wrong image to share. It is having issues focusing as well on Galaxy s8+. Also isn't backing up to Google photos.

Martin Krivosik July 24, 2017

Leaves lot to be desired. Doesn't automatically save the gifs/vids which cannot be deleted from app either . 3sec is too short, we have Boomerang for that. Add option to change it to 5 sec.

SHYAM KUMAR S July 21, 2017

Good attempt Google! 1. Can't find an option to delete the captured videos. 2. App gets crashed when the storage permission is disabled and tried capturing a video. 3. Still showing the captured videos in the app, after clearing the app data.

João Rodrigues August 3, 2017

So.. Google has some good amazing products. This One? Not so. I like to use the app and make some nice gifs but the problem start when you share the movie that you made with them. Buggy. We share a movie with 10 gifs and just the first one is available to see. Also I think it should be integrated with the camera.

Ananya Gupta July 20, 2017

The Google team will forget about it in two weeks. This should have been integrated with the camera app. Clueless PM.

Luca Stronks July 21, 2017

Awesome. The stabilisation is so good, that when I shot a chip of a wall, I thought it had just taken a picture. But no, the stabilisation is just so good you don't see the shot moving at all. Way better than MS Hyperlapse.

Joshua Barker July 23, 2017

Every replay of a motion still with audio starts with a popping sound. Annoying! No zoom! No slow mo! Basic as heck.

James Krause July 21, 2017

Great app and would have been a 5 star but there are a few flaws. I wish it would be built into the Camera app and also use Photos for storage. There needs to be a way to delete the mistakes too.

chaitanya krishnan July 23, 2017

Works great as long as it's in day light. Indoors and night are the worst, it has no exposure control.. on non nexus/pixel devices anyway

Tim Cocking July 22, 2017

There seems to be some confusion in the reviews regarding deleting files. Swipe it left to delete, swipe right to add it to the movie folder. Not sure what this is good for but it gives a nice stable result.

Parker Reed July 20, 2017

Great application. For everyone saying they want this in the camera; this is just a test bed plus not every phone has access to Google Camera.

Lee Woods July 20, 2017

This should be intergrated into the Google Camera application just as the PhotoScan app was intergrated into the Google Photos Application. The photos should also be designated an album in the Google Photos app with the option to back them up so that I manage storage space on my device easier. There is also not a way to leave Feedback from within the app

Darren Edmonds July 20, 2017

This app needs to have a timer for inactive use because when I had this app open I dozed off for a few minutes when I awoke I was shocked to feel how hot my phone had got it had never got this hot before and are worried that this will cause damage to phone if it's left open and unattended

Lisa Neigut July 20, 2017

I love it. The short videos with a tap makes videoing my 🐕 a lot easier. The stabilization is also quite cool. I had some trouble exporting to Gallery and then uploading to IG but the direct share worked great.

Jecky Lim July 24, 2017

i don't understand why people give bad reviews for this app, cause i've tried it by my self and it's absolutely great :D the stabilizer make my videos looks more smooth though my phone camera doesn't have built-in stabilizer. great job Google as always :)