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Guide · Lockimate · Updated

"Motion Not Available" on a Live Photo Wallpaper: Causes and Fixes

"Motion not available" means iOS has decided this Live Photo isn't eligible to animate as a lock screen wallpaper. The photo is still set, just without motion. The fix that rescued the most files for us is moving the key photo in the Photos app. Apple doesn't publish the rules, and an Apple engineer confirmed in August 2025 that "there are undocumented requirements". Everything below comes from testing a few dozen files on an iPhone 14 Pro Max with iOS 26 (Live Photo wallpapers need iOS 17 or later).

Try these first

  1. Move the key photo in Photos. Open the Live Photo, tap Edit, tap the Live Photo button, drag the white frame to a neighboring thumbnail, then tap Make Key Photo and Done. Then set the wallpaper again. Gallery wallpapers that iOS had refused were accepted after this one edit, with nothing else changed.
  2. Use the original Live Photo, not a copy. Exported, converted or re-saved copies often have their video re-encoded, and a Live Photo whose only video track was a fresh encode was refused in every one of our tries.
  3. Keep the key photo off the last frames. If you chose a key photo at the very end of the clip, move it a few frames earlier.
  4. If you made it from a video, keep the frame rate at 60 fps or less. A 194 fps file was refused.

If none of that helps, our Live Photo check reads the Live Photo's HEIC and MOV files, copied from a Mac, in your browser and shows whether the parts iOS needs are present.

What made iOS refuse a file

Each row comes from a file we built, saved into Photos and tried as the wallpaper. The first three rows change one thing in a camera Live Photo that works. The others are our own packaged test files.

What we changedResult
Video re-encoded with the open-source x265 encoderRefused
Video re-encoded with Apple's own hardware encoderRefused
Same video copied losslessly into a rebuilt fileAccepted
Key photo on the last frame, or the second-to-lastRefused
Key photo at 84% or at 90 to 92% of the clipAccepted
Key photo 0.26 s into a 1-second clipRefused
Frame rate of 194 fpsRefused
Frame rate of 60 fpsAccepted
Links between the metadata tracks and the video removedRefused
Lower video qualityNo effect
Rotation or audio removed from a refused fileDidn't rescue it

Encoder choice made no difference. The open-source encoder and Apple's own both produced files iOS refused, even at high quality, while a lossless copy of the same video was accepted. That may explain why so many "video to Live Photo" conversions end in "Motion not available". Files that keep working after a conversion are packaged differently from a plain re-encode.

What the picture shows didn't seem to matter; we found no sign of a content filter.

The part we can't explain

In July 2026 the pattern looked simple. Our wallpapers that failed had the whole frame moving, like a camera pan or zoom, and once our app kept the camera still, every wallpaper we checked after that was accepted. By October that explanation had stopped working. Of the gallery wallpapers we tested, the one with the most movement of all, Pier 7 Boardwalk, was accepted straight away, while a strawberry close-up with much less motion was refused. Files built the same way, by the same packager, with the same structure, went different ways.

The refused strawberry kept failing after we exported the files Photos wrote for the key-photo edit and saved them again as a new item, so the edited files alone don't carry the fix. Moving the key photo on the phone did fix it. Our best explanation is that iOS judges each Live Photo when it is saved to the library, and that an edit in Photos makes it judge again. We can't predict that verdict from the file, which is why the first fix above is worth trying even when the file looks fine.

One of our test files failed silently instead. The play button in the wallpaper editor showed a spinner, then did nothing when tapped, with no message at all.

The Apple engineer's reply also advises against reverse-engineering this behavior and suggests filing a feedback request for an API that creates Live Photos usable as wallpapers. If you're a developer hitting this, that's the official route.

Lockimate checks every gallery wallpaper on a real iPhone before it's published, and drops the ones iOS refuses.

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If you used a video-to-Live-Photo app

Converter apps take a video, trim it and save it as a Live Photo. When the result says "Motion not available", the re-encoding result above is the likeliest cause, followed by a key photo at the very end of the trim. Try moving the key photo in Photos first, since that costs nothing. If it still fails, convert again from the original video at its native frame rate rather than from an edited export.

Problems that look similar

A Live Photo is a still and a short video that share an identifier, and they only become one Live Photo when an app saves them together through Apple's Photos framework, the way Lockimate does. AirDropping the two loose files or importing them on a Mac gave us two separate items instead.

A black-and-white still is a different problem. Some of our early files showed a gray still on the lock screen while the motion played in color. The cause was a HEIC still encoded outside Apple's own encoder; re-encoding the still on the iPhone fixed it.

If it plays but only for a moment, that's how iOS works: it uses only the last ~13 frames before the key photo, as measured on how long a live wallpaper plays.

If nothing moves and there's no message, check that the play button in the wallpaper editor is on, which Apple's steps require for the photo to play on wake.

For the full setup steps, see how to make a live wallpaper on iPhone. Our test setup and what we haven't tested (other iPhones, iOS 17 and 18) are on How we test.

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