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How Long Does a Live Wallpaper Play on iPhone? We Measured It

When you wake your iPhone, a Live Photo wallpaper uses only the last ~13 frames before the key photo. On a normal camera Live Photo that is about 0.4 seconds of the clip. On screen it lasts longer, because iOS slows those frames down and eases them into the still. It plays once per wake and doesn't loop. Apple doesn't publish any of this; we measured it on an iPhone 14 Pro Max running iOS 26.

Our view: the lock screen uses only those ~13 frames, so a live wallpaper has to be built for them, and a clip cut like a short video loses most of its motion.

What we measured

A camera Live Photo is about 3 seconds long. Apple says the camera records 1.5 seconds before and 1.5 seconds after you press the shutter. To see how much of that the lock screen plays, we put a millisecond counter on a screen, shot it as an ordinary Live Photo (2.8 seconds long), set it as the wallpaper, and read which counter values appear when the phone wakes. Then we moved the key photo in the Photos app and repeated it.

Key photo atCounter values shown on wakeClip played
600 ms166 to 600 ms434 ms
1,300 ms866 to 1,300 ms434 ms
2,200 ms1,766 to 2,200 ms434 ms

The played part ended on the key photo in all three runs, and it was the same 434 ms wherever the key photo sat. At the camera's roughly 30 frames per second, 434 ms is 13 frames.

We repeated the test with Lockimate's own files, which run at 60 frames per second. With numbered frames in the video, we saw the lock screen play 217 ms of each file's timeline, which is again 13 frames. Versions of the same file looped to 1.0, 3.2 and 6.35 seconds each played 217 ms, so the share of the clip changed while the frame count didn't. Both of our setups fit a fixed ~13 frames. We haven't tested a 60 fps camera Live Photo, which would separate frame rate from the way the file was made.

Why it takes longer than 0.4 seconds on screen

iOS slows the ~13 frames down, gently at first and more and more toward the end, and in our viewing the last frames blend into the key photo rather than cutting to it. You see a short movement that comes to rest, and it feels noticeably longer than the fraction of a second it is made from.

We haven't timed that on-screen animation yet. Timing it needs a high-speed recording of the lock screen, and we'll add the number here once we have one.

Choosing where the key photo sits

The played frames end on the key photo, so the key photo decides which moment of the clip you see. You can change it in Photos: open the Live Photo, tap Edit, tap the Live Photo button, drag the white frame to another thumbnail, then tap Make Key Photo and Done.

In our packaged test files, a key photo at 84% of the clip and at 90 to 92% worked as a wallpaper. On the last frame and on the second-to-last frame, iOS refused the file and the wallpaper editor showed "Motion not available". A key photo only 0.26 seconds into a one-second file was refused as well. Leave a few frames on both sides of it.

One of our wallpapers, frame by frame

Pier 7 Boardwalk, a wallpaper from the Lockimate gallery, starts as a 5-second AI-generated clip with 121 frames. A 5-second gesture would be invisible on the lock screen, so our packager compresses the whole movement into the stretch just before the key photo. These are the source frames the lock screen shows from that file when the phone wakes:

Played frame12345678910111213
Source frame (of 121)000122946627789100108113117

The first three played frames hold the opening pose, and the key photo itself is source frame 120, the finished pose. In between, the steps shrink from about 17 source frames to 4, so the movement eases into the still the same way the lock screen's slowdown does. Played at normal speed, the same file would show you source frames 105 to 117 and nothing else.

What this means for your own Live Photos

Pick a key photo just after the motion you want to see. If the interesting moment happens early in the clip and the key photo sits in the middle, the lock screen shows the quiet part.

Slow, continuous motion survives the slowdown far better than fast action. Hair in wind, water or a slow turn of the head look smooth over ~13 frames; a jump or a wave turns into a few jerky steps.

You see the key photo far longer than the motion, since it stays on screen after the movement ends. Choose a sharp frame, not a blurred one caught mid-movement.

A longer clip doesn't buy more motion, as the 1.0, 3.2 and 6.35-second files above showed. Converted videos also run into a separate problem, since iOS refuses some of them outright; that is covered on Motion not available.

Lockimate places the motion inside those last frames for you and puts the key photo on the finished pose.

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When it doesn't play at all

Apple's steps say to make sure the play button in the wallpaper editor is on if you want the Live Photo to play when you wake the phone; with it off, the wallpaper is set as a still. If the editor says "Motion not available", iOS has refused that particular file. Our Live Photo check reads a Live Photo's HEIC and MOV files, copied from a Mac, in your browser and shows what's missing.

For the steps to set a Live Photo as your wallpaper, see how to make a live wallpaper on iPhone. For our test setup and its limits, see How we test.

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