Why Won't My Live Photo Animate as a Wallpaper? Check the File

When iOS refuses to animate a Live Photo on your Lock Screen it tells you almost nothing — the Live badge is greyed out, or the wallpaper simply sits there. There are seven things the file has to get right, and iOS checks all of them silently. This tool checks each one separately and names the one that failed.

Step one

Get both halves out of Photos

A Live Photo is two files pretending to be one. Most ways of moving it off a phone hand you only the picture — AirDrop included. One route gives you both.

1
Open the photo in Photos on a Mac Via iCloud Photos, or AirDrop it across and import. It has to be in the Photos app, not sitting in Downloads.
2
File › Export › Export Unmodified Original The step everything depends on. Plain Export flattens the Live Photo into a single image; only Unmodified Original writes out both halves.
3
Two files land, sharing one name Something like IMG_4021.HEIC and IMG_4021.MOV. Both go in the box below.

No Mac? Then this check can’t tell you anything. Tested on iOS 26.6: picking a Live Photo through a web page gives the browser a flattened JPEG — not your file, video gone. Nothing measured from that copy would mean anything.

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Files in, verdict out — whether iOS will animate this as your Lock Screen, and what to fix if not.

Drop both files here or click to choose them Checked on your device · the clip is sent only to measure movement, then discarded

What a Live Photo actually is

A Live Photo is not one file. It is a HEIC still image and a short MOV video, stored separately and joined by a shared UUID. When iOS shows you a Live Photo it is reading the still; when it animates one on the Lock Screen it plays the video, decelerating into the still at the end.

That structure is why so many "live wallpaper" apps produce something that will not animate. An app that exports an MP4, or a GIF, or a video with no paired still, has not made a Live Photo — it has made a video file that iOS will happily show as a static wallpaper and nothing more. See live wallpaper vs Live Photo for the distinction in full.

The seven requirements

Each of these is checked independently above, because the useful information is which one is missing.

1. The video carries a content identifier

The MOV needs com.apple.quicktime.content.identifier — a UUID that names which still image it belongs to. Without it, iOS sees an ordinary video.

2. The still carries a matching asset identifier

The HEIC needs the same UUID, stored in Apple's MakerNote at tag 0x0011. The two must match exactly. This is the field most often lost: re-saving a HEIC in almost any non-Apple editor strips the MakerNote, which quietly breaks the pairing while leaving the image looking fine.

3. A key-frame marker

A timed metadata track carries com.apple.quicktime.still-image-time, marking which frame of the video is the still. iOS uses it to know where the motion should settle.

4. The Live Photo vitality group

Three fields travel together: live-photo.auto, live-photo.vitality-score and live-photo.vitality-scoring-version. Files missing them are treated as plain video.

5. The motion-sensor track

A timed metadata track declaring com.apple.quicktime.live-photo-info, carrying per-frame sensor data from the capture. This is the one a converter cannot invent — see below.

6. Duration of roughly one to three seconds

iOS plays only a short window leading into the key frame. A thirty-second clip is not a longer live wallpaper; it is a file iOS is less willing to accept.

7. An HEVC video track

Apple's camera captures Live Photos as HEVC. Other codecs are less reliable, and re-encoding the video track can break eligibility even when every metadata field is still correct.

The part that surprises people

Four of the seven requirements are ordinary metadata: values sitting in the file's header that a converter either writes or forgets. The fifth is not. com.apple.quicktime.live-photo-info is a timed metadata track — a track in its own right, carrying roughly one sample per video frame, holding the motion-sensor data the camera recorded while the shot was taken.

That shape is the reason it is hard to fake. A converted video or a generated clip was never captured by a moving camera, so there is no sensor data to write. The open-source goLive works around it by transplanting the track wholesale from a genuine capture, and you can see the transplant in its output: the same track, the same sample count.

It also makes the field easy to miss. Read the file's static metadata and it is not there, because it was never a static value. We got this wrong ourselves first — an earlier version of this page claimed the field was absent from working Live Photos, on the strength of a parser that only read the header. It is checked properly now. You can see the track yourself:

ffprobe -v error -show_streams your.mov | grep -A3 'codec_tag_string=mebx'

Lockimate writes all six fields by construction, so the wallpapers it makes animate on the first try. Pick a photo, choose how it moves, and it is ready in about 2–3 minutes.

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Passing every check is not a guarantee

Format is necessary, not sufficient. A file can satisfy all six requirements and still refuse to animate, because how much the picture moves also matters — and the pattern is not the obvious one.

Measuring files that we confirmed animating on a device, the movement within the frame runs more than forty times higher than the movement of the frame. Live Photos that work tend to contain a great deal of subject motion inside a camera that stays locked. A clip where the whole scene drifts or shakes is the one that gets rejected, even when it looks calmer.

This is why a video shot by hand and converted rarely works as well as one generated with a fixed viewpoint, and it is the single most useful thing to change if your file passes every check above and still will not move.

Frequently asked questions

Why is the Live badge greyed out in the wallpaper picker?

The file iOS is looking at is not a complete Live Photo — most often the still and video are no longer paired, because requirement 1 or 2 is missing. AirDrop, Messages and email all preserve the pairing; uploading to most cloud services and downloading again does not.

My wallpaper animated before and stopped. What changed?

Usually nothing about the file. Check Low Power Mode, and Settings → Accessibility → Motion → Reduce Motion, both of which disable Lock Screen animation. Moving wallpaper on iPhone covers the full list.

Can I turn a video into a Live Photo that works?

Yes, if the converter writes all six fields. Many do not. How to turn a video into a Live Photo compares the approaches.

Does this tool upload my photo?

The six format checks run entirely in your browser — those files never leave your device. The movement measurement is the exception: decoding an HEVC clip is something Safari can do and Chrome mostly cannot, so the video is sent to our server, measured, and discarded without being stored. If you would rather it stayed local, drop only the .HEIC and you will still get the pairing check.

It says everything passed but iOS still will not animate it.

Then the cause is content rather than format — most likely too much whole-frame movement. See the section above, and how to make a live wallpaper for a source that avoids the problem.